Faculty house freshened up

Tired of eating at John Jay? Have the lounges of Carman lost their charm?

The Columbia Faculty House has finally reopened, and the renovated building may become an alternative student hangout.

The house, which was built in the ’20s and was previously described as somewhat dank, is now restored after a full construction job. According to vice president of campus services Scott Wright, it is meant as the kind of place people have in mind “when you talk about creating spaces where people can get together and talk and socialize.”

Until now, Faculty House facilities had gone from bad to worse, until the venue was not only somewhat undesirable but also unsafe. In-house audiovisual equipment was unsophisticated and crude, the plumbing was in desperate need of an overhaul, the air conditioning was faulty, and the windows were falling apart.

“You look at it [the old Faculty House] and go, ‘my God, is the house falling in?’” Wright said. “Those were not comfortable times in the house, period.”
Instead of making intermittent repairs, the solution was to close the building down altogether and do a complete overhaul. The construction has gone on for about 16 months, and facility members say there could be another three months of work ahead as workers put on the finishing touches.

While the primary purpose of the building is to provide comfortable space for University use, the directors of the project tried to make the Faculty House marketable to outside interests and events. It is advertised as a go-to place for business meetings or social functions—Wright said he had already had six soon-to-be-brides tour the house for their wedding parties, and it could host Bar Mitzvah and reunion receptions.

“We’re getting other people to help us pay the bills. It could become a 100 percent internal use if Columbia needs it, but I don’t think there’s that kind of demand,” Wright said, particularly on the weekends when faculty functions are infrequent. “We don’t want it to sit empty.”

Columbia functions receive a discount as part of a campus “budget sensitivity,” and Faculty House facilities charge what they consider competitive market prices for outside customers renting out the space.

The University Seminar program, which is housed at the Faculty House, also got an upgrade. Now over 60 years old, it brings faculty and outside experts together monthly to investigate a particular line of academic interest through dialogue and discussion. Seminar topics range from Drugs and Society to Arabic Studies. While the seminars had always been guaranteed a room, the old facilities were becoming undesirable and problematic, and some professors complained they were receiving lesser room preference than paying events. Now, the entire second floor of the Faculty House has been set aside for the program’s use during the week.

While the house was under construction, employees who worked there were moved to other jobs on campus. Some waitstaff worked in the Lerner party space buffet; chefs began working other jobs with Columbia catering. Hourly staff either went on layoff recall—meaning they left their jobs with the assumption that they would be rehired when Faculty House reopened—or retired, and a few took a kind of severance package, though they were told they could eventually reapply for their jobs.

While the project isn’t quite finished, Wright says they are on time and on budget. And the house is also LEED certified, which means the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design has credited the building for its environmental sustainability. While Columbia had not been aiming for LEED certification, it was a happy consequence of their construction decisions, which leaned toward a greener building.

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