Having It Both Ways
Can Columbia University expand into Harlem and still let Harlem move into Columbia?

by Zach Mortice
Assistant Editor

How do you . . . plan the expansion of a major educational institution with respect for the surrounding neighborhood?

Summary: Columbia University is planning a 17-acre new campus north of its main Morningside Heights university grounds. The new campus will juxtapose sleek, Modern forms next to West Harlem’s gritty, industrial streetscapes in an attempt to create a campus that invites the neighborhood into the school with glass facades, green spaces, public parks, and wide building setbacks. To ensure a smooth transition of development, Columbia will have to work with community members and local businesses that might be displaced by the expansion.

Over the next several decades, Columbia University’s 17-acre expansion will create a brand new campus in West Harlem’s Manhattanville section, springing up sleek glass low-rise towers where scruffy auto parts stores and warehouses sit today. There is no way this development won’t radically change this former industrial district, but Columbia’s most pressing priority (as with any large institution pushing into a historically venerable place) is to figure our how not to change the neighborhood.

“I think this will mean a change in the architectural character to a certain extent, but hopefully not in the range and the diversity [of neighborhood businesses],” says Marilyn Jordan Taylor, FAIA, partner of urban design and planning at Skidmore Owings and Merrill. SOM is handling the urban planning and approval process for the project.

West Harlem neighbors are concerned about the diversity as well. Jordan Taylor says that they have, “a different vision” of the neighborhood, with a more diverse array of property owners and property uses, including more manufacturing jobs. Though they share the same concerns, tenants will have to conform to the new design-driven standards set by Columbia. For example, the first floor of the proposed buildings will be mandated to have 70-percent-glazed and 50-percent-transparent façades and will be kept open to retail tenants. Businesses that can’t reconfigure themselves to accommodate this type of ground-level display will have to go.

“The tenants will have to live up to those performance qualities,” says Jordan Taylor.

A tale of two campuses
At this early stage (a formal ground breaking might still be years away), these new guidelines are meant to make Columbia a part of the Manhattanville neighborhood, not to commandeer it. Jordan Taylor calls the inviting glass ground floor a symbol of the “transparency of the opportunity to learn.” The development plan also calls for green spaces, public parks and gathering points, and wide building setbacks to reinforce the pedestrian nature of the neighborhood.

The result, Jordan Taylor hopes, will be an affable, approachable place that is less insular than Columbia’s main Morningside Heights campus, “which was developed at the turn of the last century with a heaviness and a gravitas and granite bases,” she says. It was a very high priority to have a ground level that is filled with uses that are potentially available to everyone, whether it’s an entrepreneur from West Harlem who wants to run a shop, to an exhibit area, to programs like Columbia’s Double Discovery”—an education program for New York low-income 7-12 graders.

“This isn’t a campus defined by gates and walls,” says Columbia’s Director of Construction Coordination and Facilities Warren Whitlock on the development’s Web site.

The plan will also preserve several old warehouses and factories, like the Studebaker building on 131st St., which will become university administrative offices. “We’re treating them as if they are landmarks and giving them the kind of respect that they deserve, and then adding to it, quite explicitly, buildings that contrast,” says Jordan Taylor.

Though not designed yet, the new Columbia buildings’ sleek and modern metal and glass forms promise to stand out next to their industrial masonry surroundings, a contrast Jordan Taylor calls “complementing history rather than trying to recreate it.”

The team
The site of the proposed Columbia expansion is made up of four large blocks that stretch from 129th to 133rd St. between Broadway and 12th Ave., bordering the Hudson River. Initially, the majority of the development’s work will take place in this southernmost block, where three new buildings will rise: the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, the Columbia Graduate School of Business, and an academic mixed-use building facility called the Lantern Building.

Beyond this, Columbia has building footprints and forms for 17 structures. Renzo Piano’s Building Workshop is the design architect for the project, and Jordan Taylor’s SOM has been working with the Italian firm for several years and handed design responsibilities to them this winter. Local New York-based firm Davis Brody Bond Aedas signed on this summer as the architect of record.

In balance
“Columbia has a very good track record [of] encouraging local business,” says Jordan Taylor, whose firm has worked with the school extensively. The development’s Web site ticks off the myriad benefits the expansion will grant the local community: 6,000 new jobs; 100 health-care, legal-service, and education programs; and a new university-assisted public secondary school. Columbia has promised not to use eminent domain to evict any residents, but roughly 130 people will be dislocated by the expansion.

In a press release, Columbia Senior Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin pledged that the university is “absolutely committed to ensuring that these community members will have equal or better affordable housing in the area, and we are working to achieve this result.” The development plan’s Web site says the school might help with housing searches and moving costs, but the university hasn’t commented further on how they might help local residents and businesses that need to relocate.

For their part, Jordan Taylor and SOM aren’t interested in whitewashing West Harlem and Manhattanville of its diverse, urban texture. “A certain amount of messiness goes with that,” she says.

The question, says Jordan Taylor, is: “How do we tie [these different elements] together enough but at the same time not make it feel too homogenized?”