Studio IV at The Cooper Union used the contemporary issue of the Columbia University extension in West Harlem as impetus to explore the potentials of a 21st century university campus in New York City.

The current Columbia University campus creates a precinct out of existing blocks. It fills in this grid with buildings that form a wall along the perimeter and look inward. This organization creates open air private space in the middle of the precinct while detaching itself from the surroundings. Columbia University is a typical closed campus.

The potential of an urban university is porosity with the city. My team proposes making a meaningful relationship to the existing fabric, without simply continuing the use of the organizational grid of Manhattan. The Manhattanville site is a unique area of the city because the topography of these four blocks seems to drop out from below. The infrastructure of the city, the subway system and the street, becomes expressed as a steel framework that spans above the area. Considering these factors, we developed a matrix that lifts the university off of the ground as well. This also functions as a way to preserve ties with the community and a relationship with the city. Vectors from the surroundings extend into the site at datums above the ground, allowing the city to penetrate and circulate around the university at various elevations.

One way to understand the Manhattan Street Grid is to think of each block as a pedestrian island, around which there is car circulation. There is an architectural hierarchy from street, to sidewalk, interior building circulation, and private circulation. In our matrix proposal we invert these ideas: Car circulation is submerged in the ground and the pedestrian circulation is made of continuous paths that no longer act as islands. These pathways lead through buildings so that the architectural circulation hierarchy becomes blurred. In touring the campus, walking through academic buildings would be inevitable. Intersections with other pathways are the impetus to create building nodes; this is the implicit zoning in the proposal. Like the planning of a subway or transportation system, the circulation’s intersections will become the hubs of the university. The concept of these nodes is underpinned by the universities promotion of interdisciplinary collaboration; any new academic building will connect to multiple pathways and/or other buildings. The campus is a meeting place for thoughts to collect, exchange and create. The urban campus offers meetings between disciplines, people, the individual and the community, and the city and the school.

At the ground level, there are supports for the elevated pathways. These supports are programmatically essential to the university; they are virtual and physical libraries for the neighboring academic disciplines. They also act as entries and vertical circulation into the university. At 125’ above sea level (seven stories above most of the site) is a closed ring horizontal circulation level. This pathway creates cohesiveness for the university. It locates the district of the university on the horizontal plane as the trajectories of the other pathways come in at various levels related to the park, the public transportation, and a nearby school building. The closed ring path is lifted far off of the ground to transform the traditional walled in campus into a modern space, inhabited three dimensionally and reaching upward.

At the circular level of the university, an inhabitable truss is introduced as a framing method for the university. This framing offers the opportunity for outdoor or indoor circulation throughout the university. The indoor circulation would be used as gallery space for the work of the neighboring academic disciplines. Other truss-framed areas offer the possibility for expansion; an infrastructure for new and/or temporary seminar rooms, research areas, etc. can be built into these existing nodes of the campus.