Student Center, NY
Lerner Hall
Columbia University, New York
The project we did for Columbia University proved to be quite a challenge because of the university’s historical master plan, a 19th century neoclassical academic composition. We had to fit something new and accept the rule of the 19th century master plan. Two parts of the building had to be brick, but there was no rule for what remained in-between. It was very interesting because we started to connect the two traditional wings with a system of ramps- a new type of ramp- and organize the program along them. At the bottom of the auditorium, and even further down, we placed a night club and a bookstore, the cinema, and the mailboxes, areas for meeting rooms for music and theater the experimental theater and students clubs.
At Columbia, it was the system of ramps and the point-fixing of the very light glass structure. We wanted to bring the maximum amount of light into the building itself. But again, movement is what defines space. The movement along the ramps is even activated by the use of the mailboxes.
For the new student center, we suggested a strategy that works within the regulating volumetric lines of the original 1890 plan. We placed required functional rooms within the double rectangular volumes, namely, a Broadway wing and a Campus wing, while large public spaces, such as the main lobby, auditorium and black box theater, were placed between these two rectangular volumes. The two wings used that the materials prevalent in the historical campus, but the space between them was intended to be as transparent as current technology allows.
The eight-story Broadway wing includes the cinema/assembly hall, the bookstore, game spaces, student administration, student clubs, WKCR, and three extra floors for potential academic or general administrative spaces. The cinema/assembly hall, seating 400, is located so that, by folding its screen, it can act as a balcony to the auditorium, bringing the auditorium capacity to 1500. In terms of its visual presence, the Broadway block extends the theme of the Columbia street front-a patterned brick façade over a granite base.
If a “normative” context was our strategy for the outside, invention was our objective for the inside. The student center is a small city of sorts. It is made of public and semi-public activities that must help to define a public space.
While the old student center provided neither a breathing space nor an overview of its different uses, the new center should act as a forum, a dynamic place of exchange. Its multiple activities, from its 1500 seat combined auditorium and cinema to its meeting rooms, dining halls, game rooms, student clubs, and bookstore, are to be perceived from the series of oblique lounges that link the multiplicity of disparate functions into a new University “event”. By analogy, the student center could be described as a dynamic hub that acts as a major social space.
This project is about a building that was alternatively praised and attacked for the wrong reasons. For example, conservatives derided its large expanse of glass as heresy within the historical context, while some “progressives” said its use of “mimetic” granite, bricks, and cornice was a disgrace to the ideas of progress, newness, and creativity.
Yet this was exactly our intention from the onset: to show that you can design a building that is simultaneously normative and exceptional, generic and specific, that the whole point of the building is that it does not need to be of one style, one aesthetic, one sensibility. We made this building simultaneously the norm and the exception. Columbia University had requested that we follow the Flemish bond brick pattern of the historical McKim, Mead and White buildings. We did not object to McKim’s law any more than you object to driving on the left while in England. In many ways, we considered McKim as an object trouve, a Dunchamp-like found object to interact with. Of course, what interested us most were the interstices in the law, the gap between the two McKim solids indicated in the master plan.
Our point was that neither the normative nor the exceptional were to be about “form”. We avoided “designing” this building in the compositional sense, i.e. vertically or horizontally, fragmented or continuous, projecting or receding, sculptured or minimalist, abstract shapes or figurative ones.
