This! But uptown

That was quick! From within the blushing blue Low earlier tonight, PrezBo announced that the recent recipient of the Alexander Hamilton Medal, H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest (LW ’58), has pledged to donate $30 million to a new “multidisciplinary arts venue” in the now ever-growing Manhattanville campus (no wonder he received the award!). The new Lenfest Center for the Arts will feature an art gallery, film screening room, and performance space, all designed by the renowned Italian architect Rezno Piano, One of the master designers behind the Manhattanville campus, Piano also dreamed up the NYTimes skycraper just downtown. PrezBo’s full announcement below.
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Do the Diana Center floor plans have you feeling like you just stepped into a Target? Come and join the Barnard SGA for a town hall meeting at 6 p.m. in the James Room of the Diana Center to discuss new floor plan ideas over some free dinner. Stop by for just a quick word or stay for the whole meeting and work towards a more socially conducive, less department store ambiance for your student center.

Halloween costume ideas for your dog via Wikimedia

tips@bwog.com.”>

Ramps that are more useful than Lerner's

In fact, our campus can be very confusing—especially when its late Saturday night. Send your overheards to tips@bwog.com.

Girl, pointing at Lerner: “That’s the student-ish center thing, whatever.”

Curious passerby: ”What are all these red flags for? Is there a massive capture the flag game going on?”

Escher via Wikipedia

The May issue of The Blue & White serves up a doubleheader of Butler-themed Bluenotes. You can read below about the Soviet imagery of the lobby’s mural, in the companion feature from the magazine’s curious field notes. Here, staff writer Chris Brennan tackles an aural and architectural phenomenon.

Illustration by Liz Lee

The residents of Butler can be a quiet, ant-like bunch as they silently scurry around the library’s corridors carrying over-sized bundles of schoolwork. Though Butler’s occupants aren’t always quiet—in the entrance lobby, Butler can get as loud as any other building on campus when conversations ricochet off the walls and domed ceiling to bounce around as disembodied voices thanks to the whispering gallery effect of the lobby’s design.

The phenomenon occurs mostly in structures with vaulted domed ceilings, such as Grand Central Station near the Oyster Bar restaurant and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Unlike St. Paul’s, where a person standing at a point diametrically opposed to another can hear the other side’s whisper, sounds in the Butler lobby reflect off the curved marble ceiling and can be heard distinctly and loudly between the bench in front of the Athena mural and the area right behind the security guard desk.

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Careful how you draft those plans

All sorts of plans grace the headlines today:

President Obama is to lay down his blueprint for economic recovery tonight. (NYTimes)

Blueprint appreciated: Barnard’s Diana Center is the recipient of the American Institute of Architects 2011 Honor Awards for Architecture.

Someone who knows the blueprints of NYC: Columbia University’s Professor Kenneth T. Jackson (of midnight bike ride fame), Professor in History and the Social Sciences who also really loves spaghetti. (NY Mag)

A lesson in planning–a blueprint gone wrong: How not to peddle information from Disney. (NY Post)

Image via Wikimedia

DSR's previous projects include a building made of mist

Columbia has announced the next step in its plans for Manhattanville. In the wake of a $100 million donation earlier this year, the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro has been chosen to design the new Business School. The first architects to win a MacArthur Fellowship will draw up plans for two buildings, some of first to join the Jerome L. Greene science center on the new campus.

In a press release issued yesterday, Diller stated: “Our challenge is to support Columbia’s progressive new approach to business education with architecture that participates in pedagogy and that animates a public center within the new campus and its richly layered social and industrial context.”

Although DSR might be more familiar to you as the architects of the High Line, (part 2 opening this spring!), as well as Alice Tully Hall and that cool grass thing at Lincoln Center, the firm has previous connections to the University. Two of the three partners have Columbia degrees: Scofidio has a BA in Architecture, Renfro, a Masters. The firm’s profile also states that they are in the process of designing a tower for the Medical School.

The rest of the projects slotted for the initial phase of Manhattanville expansion are new homes for SIPA, School of the Arts, and for the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering, a public school for high-performing students in Upper Manhattan that opened in a temporary space in 2007, as well as renovations to the University-owned buildings on the south side of 125th Street: Prentis Hall and faculty apartments.

We pondered its meaning, and delighted in its reflections. This building has been going up for years, but has managed to remain mysteriously shrouded in scaffolding. No longer! A day before the building officially opened on Friday, Bwog had the opportunity to join a group of journalists on an architectural tour of the building, guided by PrezBo, and the architect himself, José Rafael Moneo. Claire Sabel was there.

From the brand new entrance on 120th and Broadway, you climb an elegant staircase made from huge slabs of pale green marble. This takes you to a large open space, walled on three sides with glass and floored with more marble — soon to become the café — that seems to hover just above street level. In fact it is essentially hanging. Not to delve too deeply into the mechanical structure of the building, but it was draped (as far as you can you say that about glass) on a huge frame. The frame was built over the existing gym, and all of the facade, (basically the glass panels and steel fins) was simply hung on the outside (friction between the new layer and underlying building is reduced by giant pads of Teflon). Therefore there are no supporting columns that divide any of the spaces within the building itself, only supportive ones at the corners of the building. One of the architects from Davis Brody Bond Aedas, who also worked on the project with Moneo, explained that part of the aim of the building, and the first floor in particular, is to be transparent to the world outside, and so without the columns, you can have unobstructed views of the entire interior. Standing by the glass wall you can see all the way down Broadway. You’re close enough to ground level that you don’t feel removed, but far enough that it’s not too voyeuristic to gaze out at passersby.

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The tour met on this first level, and was ushered onto the elevators to the campus level, to where the entrance will be across the courtyard from Pupin. From this entry, you can walk right into the new two-story library. It was here that the group congregated in front of President Bollinger. PrezBo expressed warm appreciation of Moneo’s work, indentifying the building’s completion as both finally fulfilling of the McKim, Mead, and White plan, and the first landmark of the planned expansion. The building’s dimensions are exactly those specified by the original design, except for a bit of extra height, and the architects involved in the building’s design are also advising the Manhattanville project.

Bollinger’s introduction, while heartfelt, was not what we had really come for. After the conclusion of his opening remarks we set off, following Moneo on a guided tour of the building. The library had set the tone for spaces that felt very different to the minimal, rather cool attitude of the entrance. Similarly uninterrupted by columns, the theme of openness continues to be apparent. All of the desks and booths are made from slotted wood, creating many semi-private study spaces that you can still see through. The ceiling is similarly paneled with wood and — rather bizarrely — with lots of small mirrors.

The wooden interiors did make the rooms feel much cosier, an effect extremely well-achieved in the new auditorium on the floor above, with wooden walls and steeply sloping seats. It seats 170, but still feels relaxed, far less austere and sterile than one might expect from a state of the art science facility. Moneo compared the intimacy of the space to that of an operating theater (think this, kinda). There are also smaller teaching rooms on the lower floors, similarly wood-floored and snug.

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From these we walked through some of the lab spaces. Located on the higher floors they have beautiful westward facing views, to UTS, Riverside Cathedral, and the river beyond. While some are designed for specific needs, many of the labs operate on a ‘plug and play’ model, where the equipment and surfaces can be moved around and rearranged, depending on the needs of the researchers. Such interdisciplinary connections that the building is supposed to foster are manifest in every aspect of the design. Offices for professors run alongside the building on each lab floor, so that at any time, one can cross through the lab to offices on the other side. Many professors and grad students had already moved in by this point, and were working away at their computers. The harmony of the office and research spaces was already apparent – each individual fit together, neatly delineated, but comfortably compact.

The tour culminated at the top of the building, on the 14th floor, which is also walled almost entirely in glass. Although not yet finished, this space really did feel majestic, as if you were floating above the city, rather than holed up away from it. It was hard to believe that the imposing steel-clad fortress had managed to achieve such loftiness throughout its many stories. Moneo himself was delightfully enthused by the whole project, excitedly pointing out to all the intricacies of his blueprints at every possible moment.

We have, by now, gotten fairly accustomed to the view of the outside. While I appreciated its elegance, it takes the interior to complete your understanding of buildings function, and its remarkable success in marrying its academic needs with sophisticated design. Most of the public facilities are expected to open in January. Even if Frontiers was too much for you and you swore you’d never enter a science building again, it’s definitely worth a look around.

Video of the building’s construction can be found here.

Images courtesy Michael Moran and Columbia University

Well not Revson Plaza, really. What do you call that spot on the EC/SIPA/Law School plaza that’s right behind the Law School and looks down into the Wien courtyard? As of sometime in 2011, you’ll call it the fancy new Law School extension, and if you have Law Library privileges, you’ll call it “the reading room that looks like Star Trek mission control.”

The expansion plans are the doing of Ennead Architects, a firm previously known as the Polshek Partnership. They are responsible under that name for well-known projects such as The Standard Hotel (the one over the High Line) and a number of expansions and redesigns of already iconic buildings like Carnegie Hall. Neither Ennead nor the Law Library could be reached for comment, but full plans for the expansion currently appear on Ennead’s website.

The plans calls for an addition that blends into the modern facade of the existing building, emphasizing vertical and minimizes horizontal lines. The addition departs, however, from its host structure in medium – the panels in between the vertical fins you see below are made of glass, and so are those fins themselves. Click through the plan drawings to get a better sense of the new space (be warned, you’ll be prompted to get the latest Adobe Flash if you don’t have it). Here’s another view:

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“When Columbia builds, the city cringes.” (New York)

Why New York is a city of superheroes. (City Room)

Legos will solve all the city’s problems. (NY Post)

We will not be scammed! (NYDaily)

Big changes are happening where 120th Street meets Broadway. With one new building opened and another not long from completion, the northwest part of campus is in the middle of a full-blown façade-lift. The Blue & White examines these changes in the latest issue, now available campus-wide.

This February saw the presentation of Morningside’s newest daughter. The long-awaited Diana student center finally emerged in ceremony after ceremony; after opening her doors and shedding her fences in late January, amidst a shower of berets they finally cut her ribbon to great applause. She may be Barnard’s pride and joy of the moment, but architecturally she is one of two black sheep to join the neighborhood this year. The other odd-man-out stands across Broadway—called the Northwest Corner Building for now, this younger creature of indeterminate gender may feel even more out of place as it struggles to live up to the standard set by its older brothers, the aristocratic and ornate McKim, Mead, and White-esque science buildings of north campus.

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The abandoned stone structure on 119th and Amsterdam sort of looks like a medieval castle – a very, very small one. It isn’t quite the stuff of architecture classes, but the little building stands out – you’ve probably wondered what it is or was as you passed the forgotten, weedy lot. It’s not like there’s a dearth of old buildings around here, but everyone knows the deal on St. John the Divine, the old St.Luke’s hospital buildings, and you know, Columbia. Bwog unveils this final mystery – a riveting tale of the forgotten, the clandestine, the underground… literally.

The trail of the underground aqueduct in Manhattan

It turns out that the 119th street gatehouse, as it is called, is part of a now defunct and closed off aqueduct system that runs from the Croton River upstate, through the Bronx and under Amsterdam. The gatehouses give access to the New Croton Aqueduct and pumping mechanisms underground. The original Croton Aqueduct began construction in 1837 after a really big fire made it clear that a growing city needed a real water source and a real distribution system. Two reservoirs were constructed to hold water for the city brought in from Croton – one where the New York Public Library now stands and one on what would become the site of the Great Lawn in Central Park.

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Numerous tipsters have highlighted the featured article in today’s Times arts section, about the still-under-construction Northwest Science Building, and its architect, Jose Rafeo Moneo. The article provides a comprehensive overview of the many difficulties that the project has faced, including building on top of the gym, complementing the Manhattanville expansion, and, um, anonymous commenters. 

Yes, to demonstrate that “not everyone is happy with the results,” the Times cites a comment from an old Bwog article. “[I]n 2007, a poster called “arch. major” wrote, ‘McKim, Mead & White will roll over in their graves,’ adding that the building made Uris Hall, the widely derided main building of Columbia’s business school, completed in 1961, ‘look like the Pantheon.’ ” Good thing there isn’t an article on Harmony in the works.

- Photo: schmuela/Flickr

The new issue of the Blue and White is on a Butler desk or newstand near you! Daniel Libeskind is one of the world’s most famous architects, having designed some of the most striking buildings of the past two decades, including Berlin’s Jewish Museum, the extension to the Denver Art Museum, and Toronto’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, which Condé Nast Traveler has called one of the “New Seven Wonders of the World.” Libeskind is also the master architect behind the new World Trade Center, a massive project that stands to revitalize lower Manhattan when its first stages are completed in the coming few years. Blue and White senior editor Jon Hill visited Libeskind at his Financial District studio to talk about the project, his career, and the future of modern architecture.

The Blue and White: What first sparked your interest in architecture?

Daniel Libeskind: It was not at first. I was a professional musician, in fact. But, I got interested in mathematics and the sciences, and I was always painting and drawing. I think I fell into architecture because, in a way, architecture combined all my interests. It’s visual music. It’s about proportions; it’s about geometries; it’s about precision and emotion. But it’s not as if I started at the beginning saying, “I want to be an architect.” I hardly even knew what an architect was. I had never met an architect until when I was in school.

B&W: And has that influenced your designs today?

DL: Oh yes, absolutely. I think for many years I didn’t build not because I was averse to building or because I was a theorist, but because I took a different path to architecture. I didn’t apprentice myself to architects because I didn’t like what they were doing. And I didn’t like the whole idea of the office, this kind of nine-to-five idea. So, I thought, “I’ll do architecture in another way,” and to support myself, I taught. Students are very creative, very different from the commercial world where people have a narrow view of what is good and what is not good. Read more…

Intrepid Bwog contributor, frequent Bwog commenter, and skyscraper enthusiast Alex Weinberg sends us a tip about some questionable iconogrpahy:

“KSA is advertising some sort of culture show on a thousand balloons and fliers and posters all over the campus. Non engineers/architects may not appreciate this, but they completely fucked up and branded their show with the skyline of CHICAGO.”

How does he know? Well, that big building second from the left appears to be the Sears Tower, not the Empire State Building. “The Empire State Building has one antenna built on the original mooring mast,” says Alex. “The Sears Tower has double antennae (kind of more, now).”

UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive: the two skylines placed side to side (or top to bottom) for comparison, after the jump.

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While Bwog enjoyed the sunny weather on such a splendid day, several things also caught our attention:

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  Bacchanal festivities coincided with today’s, er, other special celebrations, including Battle of the Bands, a much-too-limited barbecue, a moonwalk, and a sorority-sponsored “munchies” sale. Columbia’s beloved mascot was also spotted roaming about (pictured to the right), giving hugs and shaking hands with the chilled-out student crowd around College Walk.  In the meantime, pre-frosh were abundant for SEAS Days on Campus. Talk about hyperbolic advertising.
  

• Bwog reader Alex Port brings us news that the Joseph Urban stage models on the third floor of Butler (which have been there for ages) have been removed. What will the Butler treasure chest reveal to us next? Perhaps Robert Moses models instead?
• As if the to-be-built Northwest Science Building weren’t enough, the J-School plans on doing some construction of its own. The Stabile Student Center is scheduled to open in Fall 2007, complete with café space, outdoor seating, and a glass enclosure. Glass is all the rage in these parts, it seems…

• Since we’re on the theme of architecture: SEAS Class Day speaker Santiago Calatrava has designed a 2,000-foot tall Chicago tower that could trump every other building in America. Daaamn. [Insert "ivory tower" joke here.]
  

• Spectator‘s most recent multimedia project happens to be on the arrest of  Robert Williams, although it seems a bit New York Post-ish for the Spec’s image. Really, “Perp Walk,” guys?
  

 - MIP