Columbia Business School

New York
Architects
UNStudio
Location
130th Street / Broadway, New York
Year
2009
Client

Columbia University

Data
Building surface: 485,000 GSF > 45.000 m2
Building site: 39700 GSF > 3700 m2

Programme
Graduate School of Business at Columbia University

Status
Competition Entry

Credits
UNStudio: Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos with Wouter de Jonge, Christian Veddeler, Imola Berczi and Jan Schellhoff, Elena Scripelliti, Joerg Petri, Jordan Trachtenberg, Seok Hun Kim, Nanang Santoso, Hans Peter Nuenning, Erwin Horstmannshof

Advisors
Executive Architect: Handel Architects LLP
Engineering Services: Structural, MEP
Sustainability, Curtain Wall: Buro Happold
Consultant Services. IT, Acoustical, Audiovisual, Security: Shen Milsom & Wilke, Inc
Lighting Designer: Renfro Design
Way Finding & Signage: Mijksenaar-Arup
Vertical Transportation: Van Deussen
Expediting and Code Consulting: JAM Consultants Inc.
Estimating Consultant: Stuart – Lynn Company
Roofing and Waterproofing Consulting: Israel Berger Associates LLC
Visualisations: rendertaxi

The design for the new Graduate School of Business at Columbia University offers an opportunity to embrace innovation in the pedagogy of business education.

The building is designed to use the creative enterprise of the school to facilitate cross-disciplinary interaction between the professional world, the campus, and the community at large.

The flexibility of spaces (in both the short- and long-term) drives the design approach. The design seeks to remove constraints on both instruction and student development, and to create a building which not only supports the need for flexibility, but which celebrates community as a central tenet.

Student work-study spaces and faculty divisional spaces are concentrated in plan and section to promote collaboration across all disciplines. In addition, the spaces are connected vertically within a series of voids and internal staircases, and paralleled on several floors in one intensified zone.

Both formal and informal interactions and encounters are encouraged throughout the design. Consideration for the interior organisation of spaces in relationship to one another begins with the circulation. Corridors are considered not in terms of size, but for their capacity to contain and distribute large concentrations of people, whilst simultaneously accommodating surges in traffic and lingering individuals. Infrastructural space is employed to orchestrate informal interaction and enable a heterogeneous mixture of these spaces that are open for reconfiguration and appropriation. The building, therefore, has no traditional corridors, but maintains qualitative networking conditions.

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