Architecture Review
A Building Forms a Bridge Between a University’s Past and Future
Northwest Corner Building Designed by José Rafael Moneo, Columbia University’s new addition is anticipated as a gateway to a campus planned for West Harlem. More Photos »
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: February 8, 2011
I’m sure that a few preservationists are already grumbling about the new interdisciplinary science building at Columbia University. It certainly doesn’t fade politely into its brick surroundings. But they’d be wrong to think that it disrespects history.
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Designed by the Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo, the new building, at the corner of Broadway and 120th Street, draws on a range of precedents, from the austere Modernism of Adolf Loos to the original McKim, Mead & White master plan for Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. Its muscular steel-and-aluminum frame is a vivid example of how to fit into a difficult historical context without slavishly kowtowing to it.
It is also, not incidentally, a work of healing. Seen in the context of Columbia’s often tense relationship with its Harlem neighbors, including recent battles over its plans to build a new 17-acre campus in West Harlem, the building is a gleaming physical expression of the university’s desire to bridge the divide between the insular world of the campus and the community beyond its walls.
Mr. Moneo is well suited to this task. A former chairman of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, he has a modest, thoughtful demeanor. (Colleagues and students often describe him as a priestlike figure.) His best works — like the National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, Spain, and an expansion of the 19th-century Atocha railway station in Madrid — are part of a continuing dialogue with his historical predecessors.
Like these earlier projects, the science building, officially the Northwest Corner Building, serves as a hinge between past and present. Framed to the east and south by the austere 1920s-era masonry buildings of the McKim, Mead & White campus, it will eventually serve as the main gateway between that campus and the West Harlem one, which will be located several blocks away to the northwest.
Mr. Moneo’s design is carefully grounded in the original campus plan. The building’s base, which is made of the same rose-colored granite as the buildings that flank it, is conceived as an extension of the existing street wall. Its 14-story height, considerably greater than that of its neighbors, echoes the brick and limestone gothic tower of the Union Theological Seminary, which stands cater-corner across the street. (It is also slightly lower than the tower that McKim, Mead & White originally proposed for the site.)
But it is the tension Mr. Moneo creates between new and old that brings the building to life. The upper floors are clad in what may be the most elegant aluminum siding in America: a taut steel grid filled in with an irregular pattern of diagonal steel braces and aluminum louvers. The braces are not decorative — they reflect the uneven loads and stresses on the building, which is supported on an enormous truss that spans the gym below. But even if you don’t know this, you intuitively sense the tension that is built into them; it is as if the structure were straining to break free of the constraints of the site.
The effect is especially acute at the corner, where the building suddenly seems to crack open from the stress, its upper floors cantilevering 15 feet over the lobby entrance. The lobby interior is clad in richly veined Portuguese marble, the kind of sumptuous material that Loos used to lessen the severity of his spaces. A stair, in the same marble, ascends to a mezzanine-level cafe that overlooks the street through floor-to-ceiling windows: a kind of interstitial zone floating just above the city. From there, more stairs lead up to a campus-level lobby, 35 feet above the street. (All these spaces are open to the public.)
This is superb architecture: clean, compact and perfectly calibrated. And the sequence is even more powerful in reverse: from the campus-level lobby, the climb down the staircase is something like descending into a marble quarry.
But the design is also a means of reinforcing the university’s public mission. By easing you through the transition from one level to the other in just three quick turns along the stair, Mr. Moneo has fused together two disparate worlds — the campus and the street outside — and created places of intense social communion. (A wide exterior staircase, located on the east side of the building, makes this connection even more directly, allowing people to bypass the structure in moving between the campus and 120th Street.)
And a similar spirit of openness and exchange exists on the upper floors, whose big, loftlike spaces were designed so that they could be reconfigured to fit the needs of various researchers. The seventh floor, for example, which houses molecular and nanotechnology laboratories, is a maze of private offices, while the 12th-floor chemistry labs are more open and airy. Enclosed bridges connect these floors to neighboring science buildings as a way to encourage the kind of interdisciplinary exchange that is the building’s core mission.
In short, this is a building conceived in opposition to our contemporary culture, with its constant visual noise and unforgiving pace. Mr. Moneo aims to lift us, if only momentarily, out of our increasingly frenetic lives — to slow us down and force us to look at the world around us, and at one another, more closely. It’s a big, tough building, but it’s tenderhearted too.
Columbia’s Science Building as a Bridge - Review - NYTimes.com
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