Columbia University this week marks the official opening of its new 188,000 square foot Northwest Corner Building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect José Rafael Moneo, in collaboration with the architects at Madrid’s Moneo Brock Studio and New York’s Davis Brody Bond Aedas.

 

“What Rafael Moneo has created here is literally a bridge—both across areas of scientific knowledge and from our history to our future at Columbia,” said University President Lee C. Bollinger. “As the final addition to the original perimeter of our Morningside Heights campus, this building completes one of the greatest academic settings in the world, but it also performs an important task of opening up a new, transparent pathway between campus and community on a street corner where there had long been only a blank wall. This is an important milestone in Columbia’s history more than a century after our move from midtown to Upper Manhattan.”

 

The innovative structure houses cutting-edge labs gathering together researchers in biology, chemistry, physics and engineering, as well as a science library, lecture hall and café, completing the outlines of the University’s original Morningside Heights campus plan by McKim, Mead, and White. Built as a bridge above the existing Levien Gym in the Dodge Physical Fitness Center and supported by a 129-foot long, three-dimensional truss, the 14-story facility accommodates seven double-height lab floors designed to mitigate vibration and allow for flexible layouts as new scientific research priorities evolve.

 

“The connections to the neighboring buildings guarantee activity and life, reinforcing the interdisciplinary program needed in state-of-the-art research,” Rafael Moneo said about his first building in New York City. “It has been very exciting to create a building in New York that uses this unique site to draw people together in new ways while respecting Columbia’s great campus architecture. I hope this building will become part of the fabric both of the University and of the city.”