by: Jacqueline Pezzillo Assoc. AIA LEED AP
Event: Architecture for New Science/New Science for Architecture
Location: Center for Architecture, 02.02.10
Speakers: William Paxson, AIA — Partner, Davis Brody Bond Aedas; Robert Goodwin, AIA, LEED AP — Design Principal, Perkins+Will; Anthony Alfieri, AIA, LEED AP — Project Manager, Perkins+Will; Roger Duffy, FAIA — Design Partner, SOM
Organizer: AIANY Architecture for Education Committee
Columbia University Northwest Corner Building. Design Architect: José Rafael Moneo, Hon. FAIA. Associate Architect: Davis Brody Bond Aedas.
Image © Michael Moran
The Northwest Corner Building at Columbia University, the New Science Building at CUNY’s Lehman College, and the Koch Center for Science, Math and Technology at Deerfield Academy are three facilities exemplary of synergistic design for academic science and research. The three buildings — presented by Davis Brody Bond Aedas, Perkins+Will, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill respectively — have each embraced the concept of connectivity among departmental researchers and students to encourage interdisciplinary learning. As Anthony Alfieri, AIA, LEED AP, Perkins+Will project manager for the Lehman College facility explained, the New Science Building is intended to be a “place of dialogue, debate, inquiry, and discovery.” Columbia’s Northwest Corner Building, designed by Rafael Moneo, Hon FAIA, with Davis Brody Bond Aedas as associate architect, is similarly conceived as a collaborative environment with deliberate ambiguity about departmental locations on lab floors, even with construction completion slated to end this year.
The facilities, designed to reach LEED Silver (Northwest Corner Building), Gold (Koch Center), and Platinum (New Science Building) requirements, each contain educational elements. The Northwest Corner Building, a structural feat which spans an existing gymnasium approximately 120 feet at the plaza level, echoes the lateral bracing algorithm in the aluminum façade design. “A critical challenge for the project,” according to William Paxson, AIA, partner at Davis Brody Bond Aedas, was maintaining operation of the gymnasium during construction while the 185,000-square-foot building was erected around and above the long span space. The courtyard created by the massing of the Lehman College facility is treated as a constructive wetland and employed as a teaching tool, or a “living lab,” as described by Alfieri. The Koch Center for Science, Math and Technology, completed in 2007, contains an analemma skylight which etches a figure-eight path of light on a wall within the building, demonstrating the annual movement of the earth around the sun.
Jacqueline Pezzillo, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP, is the communications manager at Davis Brody Bond Aedas and a regular contributor to e-Oculus.