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Click
on images for larger views. [Google Earth link]
Barnard
College, "The Liberal Arts College for Women in New
York City" is located in Manhattan's Morningside Heights
neighborhood, directly across Broadway from Columbia University's
much larger campus. While part of the University's system
of four undergraduate schools, by virtues of its inner-workings
and having its own campus, the College has its own unique
identity, surely to be strengthened by the Nexus,
a 110,000-sf (10,200-sm) mixed-use building that "will
serve as both a center of student life and activity and a
home to several of the College’s showcase programs,
including art, architecture, and performance."
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Designed by New York-based Weiss/Manfredi,
the building, now under
construction, is at first glance a simple glass box, in
the traditions of so many glass boxes in Manhattan. But the
plan and section indicate
that something more complex is going on, first by a slicing
of the box in plan to open Lehman Lawn to the south to the
courtyard of Millbank to the north. These open spaces are
linked by a stepped plaza, with stairs expressed on the adjacent
west façade, a parallel
internal circulation. |
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Second the architects removed
"chunks" from the building's interior to create
what they call
"slipped atria." Diagonally stretching from the
Lawn to the roof and a grid of skylights near the northern
end of the building, the slipped
atria finds expression on the Broadway elevation, but
its internal logic is this gesture's biggest strength. The
complex spaces visually link the various levels, furthering
a sense of community on the campus and connecting the different
departments brought together in the building, while at the
same time allowing each their own identity, much like the
College within the greater Columbia University system.
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Like other glass boxes in the
city, great effort and expense is given to the façade,
but the luminous terra-cotta glass
panels that the architects devised depart from other glass
boxes in their rich expression. If the renderings have any
truth, the glazing will successfully relate to the surrounding
masonry buildings and provide a depth that is greater than
its shallow reality, something most glass boxes have a hard
time achieving. The spacing and articulation of the solid
panels help enrich the façades, while also emphasizing
and bringing additional daylight to the slipped atria. It's
an apparently simple building that expresses the College's
sense of identity and community to the neighborhood and its
"parent" across the street. |
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Click
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