In Manhattanville, plans develop where buildings stood

Spectator looks into recent happenings at Columbia's Manhattanville expansion. Check out our stories on the University's relationship with the community and the formation of a new development corporation in West Harlem.

Six cranes loom over the barren site on 129th Street. Where manufacturing warehouses once stood, today a mound of dirt signals the beginning of construction on Columbia’s expansion into Manhattanville.

Seven years ago last week University President Lee Bollinger first announced Columbia’s plans to build the largest expansion of the campus in over 100 years, and in December the University surpassed the final legal hurdles that had threatened the plans.

Vice President for Facilities Joe Ienuso told Spectator last week that the first buildings are scheduled to open in 2016.

“I’m going to hand the keys to somebody in my organization and say ‘let them in’ in 2016,” Ienuso said.

Scheduled for completion by 2020, Phase I of the project will create six buildings, the future homes of the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, the School of the Arts, the Business School, the School of International and Public Affairs, and an academic conference center. The area spans from 125th to 131st streets, a three-block distance, and from Broadway to 12th Avenue.

The full expansion zone will stretch north to 133rd Street and be completed by 2033. Of the 17 planned buildings on campus, the specific uses of only six have been determined.

In the last few months, as the University has selected architects and proceeded with demolition, Spectator took a look into what’s happening north of 129th Street: a neuroscience center with over 70 labs, a Business School trying to enter the 21st century, and a conference center University officials have dubbed “the Bow Tie.”

JEROME L. GREENE SCIENCE CENTER
Construction on the science center, the only building that has been completely designed, will start in spring 2013 and last three years, Ienuso said.

It will house the University’s Mind, Brain and Behavior Initiative and with it 70 labs, a functional imaging center, dozens of meeting spaces, and an education outreach center targeted at “anybody else who wants to learn about current views on brain science,” said Dr. Thomas Jessell, the appointed director of the building and a professor of neuroscience, biochemistry and molecular biophysics.
As for fundraising, “we’re set,” Bollinger said. “Now we have to raise funds for programming.”

In March 2006, the University announced that they had received a donation of over $200 million by Dawn M. Greene in honor of her late husband, Jerome L. Greene, CC ’26, Law ’28. At the time, it was the largest gift ever given to Columbia and the largest private gift received by any American university for the creation of a single facility.

Jessell said the Greene gift “gave the University the confidence that this is really going to work,” but that “the building is really more expensive.”

The building’s design, helmed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, embraces the interdisciplinary nature of neuroscience.

Two floors are interconnected by internal stairs so that, according to Jessell, it is “as easy to interact vertically as it is horizontally with one’s neighbors. There could be 10 or 20 labs working together at a time.”

Of the approximately 70 faculty members, two-thirds will be “card-carrying neuroscientists,” as Jessell put it. But for the rest of the faculty, Jessell said, “we’re going to need disciplines that go way beyond conventional views of what neuroscience is—we will work with engineers, computer scientists, applied mathematicians, statisticians, physicians, biologists, the works.”

Final plans for the building include entrances on all four sides, which Ienuso said was representative of the open-campus approach they have taken towards the design.

“Think about Manhattanville as if you took the Morningside campus and you grabbed it from the middle and turned it out,” Ienuso said.

Members of the Coalition to Preserve Community, a local activist group, have said that they are concerned that the center includes plans for a Biosafety Level-3 facility, a laboratory that studies organisms which could cause serious diseases, but for which cures exist.

“A great deal of attention has gone into thinking how to effectively risk-free way introduce a new science building into that area,” Jessell said. “There will be molecular biology research going on, but nothing in any way ramping up the level of biohazard safety.”

SCHOOL OF THE ARTS
Just to the west of the Greene Science Center will be the new home of the School of the Arts, but those involved with the project call it the Lantern Building. A nickname developed by Piano, its architect, Ienuso explained, “The Lantern Building describes for Renzo, from an urban planning perspective, the beacon—its function, from its purest and simplest form.”

Piano is “a romantic and he is a humanist at his core,” Ienuso said. “You’ll see in almost everything that Renzo draws by hand this sort of spiral. And what Renzo means by that is what I would refer to as the center of gravity. Everything has a center of gravity. For Renzo, the center of gravity is here and the campus will radiate out from there—the lantern.”

The building—one of the smallest in the site plan—will have a film screening center, flexible performance and reading spaces, and a gallery on the first floor to work with the Art History department and the Wallach Gallery, said SoA Dean Carol Becker.

“These are general categories that will need much more elaboration as the building proceeds,” Becker said.

The SoA has received two substantial gifts, Becker said, with others pending.

Bollinger said, “I think we’re very close with fundraising. … I feel that we’re almost there” for it to open in 2016 alongside the science center.

BUSINESS SCHOOL
The two B-School buildings will be “a kind of a mini-campus inside of a bigger campus,” said architect Liz Diller of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, the Manhattan-based firm that was hired in January.

Located between 130th and 131st streets, the buildings will look out onto a large green space of about 40,000 square feet.

“It’s a center of the Manhattanville campus, so it’s a very, very important spot,” Diller said.

The B-School is in a preliminary design phase while the architects and the University explore the best way to fill the two buildings. Diller said that in addition to a large amount of area devoted to faculty and administrative spaces, “there are all sorts of amenities, an auditorium, food service, and social spaces.”

Diller said she hopes to strike a balance between the two buildings.

“The thing that we don’t want to do is make one building that’s very animated with teaching and learning and another building that is just support,” Diller said. “We’re trying to distribute the energy of the two programs between the two buildings, but we don’t want them to replicate each other.”

Diller likened the relationship between the two buildings to the 1930s’ tap-dancing duo of movie stars Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

“With Fred and Ginger, it’s a nice metaphor in that you really have two very different beings. They don’t look alike but they work synchronously and in step.”

By the end of this summer, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro will develop a schematic design—physical blueprints—although a specific completion date hasn’t been set yet.

The firm will also work to make the Business School a model for 21st-century economics. “The influence of the news on policy and on the markets is such a changeable thing,” she said. The connectivity between the Business School and other business schools around the world, as well as news sources, news sites, and the ability to use smart technologies, is an interesting challenge. It should serve as a kind of gathering space.”

A $100 million gift by Henry Kravis, Business ’69, will fund one of the two buildings. Bollinger said, “I think they’re really on their way” to reaching the $400 million goal.

ACADEMIC CONFERENCE CENTER
Because neither the Morningside nor the Medical School campus has a unified place to hold a conference, the academic conference center will accommodate international meetings hosted by faculty from all of Columbia’s schools.

Built on the triangle of land where 125th Street meets 129th Street, the building received the nickname “the Bow Tie” by Piano. Just down Broadway is another triangle of land, home to the famed jazz bar The Cotton Club—and though that triangle is not part of the construction, Piano thought the two pieces of land resembled a bow tie.

It will be located at the southernmost tip of the Manhattanville campus—a location meant to connect the center to undergraduates in Morningside Heights.

“It’s a way of attracting the Columbia undergraduate away from their zone of familiarity at 116th ... We want to break down that barrier of walking up Broadway,” Jessell said. “Every effort will be made to make this as enticing for undergrads as well as for international visiting scholars.”

In a February University Senate meeting, Bollinger said he hoped the conference center would be open within five years, at the same time as the science center and the School of the Arts building.

Bollinger said in a recent interview that the University’s fundraising for the center was ongoing. “I’m optimistic. I can’t say we’re quite almost there, but I’m optimistic,” he said.

SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Of the six buildings, the last one to be completed will be home to SIPA. Ienuso estimated it would not be complete until the early 2020s.

Because the building is slated for construction after the other five, both the creative and financial processes are behind those of the other schools who will make the move to Manhattanville. Piano has not begun a preliminary draft of the building’s design, and fundraising has taken a backseat to evaluating current SIPA programs.

The building “is further away in terms of fundraising” than the other Phase I buildings, Bollinger said, but “[SIPA Dean] John [Coatsworth] and I are talking about how to begin a building campaign.”

Coatsworth said that the school’s strategy for raising money begins “at square one—with a stronger donor base and fundraising infrastructure.”

“Other schools moving to Manhattanville may be benefiting from greater depth on these two fronts,” Coatsworth said. “As always, we are optimistic about the future here at SIPA, but we also are mindful that it is premature to be talking about a move which, while eagerly anticipated by every school involved, will be years in the future for any of us.”

Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin told Spectator that Coatsworth, former Provost Alan Brinkley, and Bollinger made the decision that their first priority for SIPA would be to “further the quality of the programming.”

“They’ve made extraordinary efforts to develop SIPA, but academic programming is going to come before physical space needs,” Kasdin said.

NEXT STEPS
Demolition began in late summer 2010, but so far only the first block between 129th and 130th streets has been completely cleared of buildings. Before construction on any new buildings can begin, Bovis Lend Lease, the principal construction company, must build a slurry wall—a steel trench around the perimeter of the construction site to keep out groundwater. Ienuso estimated work on the slurry wall will begin within a month and last for two years.

The completion of the slurry wall in spring 2013 will mean the beginning of steel rising for the first building, the science center, said Philip Pitruzzello, Vice President of Manhattanville Construction.

Pitruzzello said there is no timeline for the condemnation and the eventual acquisition and demolition of the properties which belong to Nick Sprayregen, Gurnam Singh, and Parminder Kaur, who have not sold their properties to the University.

Sprayregen’s Tuck-It-Away Storage properties currently take up part of the SIPA site plan, while Singh and Kaur’s two gas stations take up part of the academic conference center and SIPA sites.

Beth Mitchell, a spokesperson for the Empire State Development Corporation, which has the power to use eminent domain to purchase the properties, said that the organization is in the process of appraising the contested lands. Once the ESDC makes an offer it can begin to acquire the properties to sell to Columbia. Mitchell said she expected the acquisition process to begin before the end of the year.

According to Columbia officials, details and completion dates are still uncertain for the other phases of the expansion plan, which will develop the blocks north of these six buildings. The final phase isn’t scheduled for completion until 2033—over two decades away.

“In the end we’re making a campus, not just buildings,” Diller said. “We’re working on a small city.”

finn.vigeland@columbiaspectator.com