by: Jessica Sheridan Assoc. AIA LEED AP
(Continued from above)
e-O: Tell me about how you researched and developed the site model.
Christopher Pounds: The first thing that leapt out at us was the large dip in the site’s typography. We then took note of Riverside Drive, the MTA bridge, and the subway that comes out of the ground, and from there we looked at what programs on the site are useful to the community. We kept those programs and cleared others out to create an open space. Because two bridges are already lifted off the ground, we proposed a scheme that was also lifted off the ground, providing open access to those programs from all sides.
Anna Kostreva: We decided to create trajectories from the street and another building that has elevated functions. Around nine stories up, we developed a circular ring creating cohesiveness for the university.
CP: In some ways it’s a critique of the Columbia campus, because the campus is gated off and we’re introducing direct access from all sides. We tried to provide many points of access on the campus. Those points are where we located vertical towers that contain libraries.
AK: The idea is that whoever is coming in from the university would access the university through a library relating to neighboring academic programs. Individuals come into the university structure either in a virtual or physical way. The endeavor for knowledge is what’s holding the university up.
So people come up through the library, access the university, and then the framework of the circle level acts both as interior and exterior where people move from one locus to the next.
CP: Our matrix also suggests how the campus can expand for the next few hundred years. There’s a finite quality to the circle, but portions extend out, suggesting trajectories for future generations.
AK: The towers can also expand upward, and the framework toward the interior.
e-O: Once the matrix was established, how did the rest of the students in the studio integrate their projects?
CP: Some chose to completely reject the structure, some chose to directly integrate. There are some projects that worked with the ground, even though the matrix is elevated, and these projects challenged the matrix. There is also a wide variety of scales among the projects. Dennis and Raye’s project integrates with the structure. Tom placed his tower completely out of the matrix, but it works with the ground in a specific way.
Dennis Murphy: We saw the matrix as the generator for our project. We incorporated a pier near the river’s edge between Riverside Drive and the Hudson River, and we oriented a vertical tower in the center.
Raye Levine: We started with a program of a marketplace. We wanted to create a center where everyone in the university can gather. Plazas provide exhibition space for artwork. We developed a center displaced from the center [of the matrix] where the city ends and water begins.
DM: The program is for an exchange of knowledge, not necessarily just art.
RL: And also the university and city can branch out into the water.
DM: One other thing is that we never saw our project as being just for students. Students and the public can use the space. That’s really important to us.
Tom Brooksbank: I imagine that my tower is an alter ego on the site, because during the day it’s dark, and at night it lights up. It would be an “other,” a presence on the site. I was also trying to find a way to make an ambiguous space, where you can’t really tell which elevation you are looking at or how deep it is.
The program is for photosensitivity research. There isn’t really a cure or a known reason for this sun allergy. So the ground level is in essential darkness that would be for research, healing, and living for those extreme cases. Then the building would get lighter as you go up. Within the building are these curvilinear spaces that wrap around the human body as you move through it. I tried to find a completely new type of space.
e-O: Did you find that the studio agreed on any ideas about what a “campus of the future” could be?
LW: They thought not so much about permanent monuments, but about temporary structures that can come and go rather than be fixed. There was a lightness and transience to design. It gives way to a transparency rather than opacity of morals.
AK: The idea of movement among disciplines was taken on by a lot of students, which was promoted by our matrix by having circulation at different levels and direct connections between structures themselves.
e-O: How did working on this project change your idea of what urban planning/architecture is?
TB: It’s a laboratory to try and find things that could reappear and develop later in our work. It’s 32 different ideas of what architecture can become. Also, there isn’t any right or wrong. It’s about choices and taking them as far as you can.
AK: For us [as master planners], it was a struggle to articulate something at an urban scale and a unified whole, while still allowing the individual projects to have an identity.
CP: One great achievement of the project is that it’s not just a campus of the future, it’s talking about the future of education. It’s a moment that people can begin to see new ways of linking disciplines. Because the structure is so readable, people will be able to accept those changes, and new connections — or disconnections — may develop over time.