Columbia University and Community, or Mr. Piano and his Piazza
Written for Karrie Jacobs’ class “Contemporary Issues in Design”
Has anyone told the architect Renzo Piano that saying the word ‘community’ does not magically make one materialize?
Mr. Piano and his Building Workshop are the master planners and architects of several buildings (the Jerome L. Green Science Center, the Lenfest Center for the Arts, and the University Forum) for Columbia University’s new Manhattanville campus, located between West 125th Street and West 135th Street on the far west side of Harlem. The area has—like most of New York—a rich history, having once been a major centre for industry and transportation due to its close proximity to the Hudson River. The Sheffield Farms dairy plant, an almost theatrical white-tiled monument to purity and cleanliness, lines the southern edge of the new campus; the Studebaker automobile building, a solid, brick industrial building with a robust, white-trimmed tower, stands guard to the north.
Columbia obtained this land, just north of its existing classical McKim, Mead and White campus, partly through expropriation and lengthy court battles, one of which went all the way to The Supreme Court. Most of Manhattanville’s existing community was forced out, although Mr. Piano and Columbia have paid much lip service to how this new campus will be for the whole community (what’s left of it).
Compared to Columbia’s main campus, which has some large gates that close it off from the street, Manhattanville will be more open: there are no gates! Columbia, in its effort to modernize, is generously keeping the existing streets open to through-traffic and pedestrians. The lobbies, open spaces (the piazza, as Mr. Piano likes to call it) and a few galleries in the Center for the Arts will be public (but don’t worry, there are still gates in the lobbies - sleek, pretty ones, but gates nonetheless).
If you build it, no matter what it is, will they come? Piano et all. seem to think so, despite the fact that these lobbies and outdoor spaces are sparsely, sparely furnished, hardly inviting anyone to walk through, let alone linger. Mr. Piano, did you know that people often like places where they can sit down? On a chair, with a table for their coffee, perhaps, or maybe on a bench, where they might soak up some afternoon sun? And one more thing: the broad steps that take one down from the Science Center’s entrance on Broadway towards the core of the building and the rest of campus is not accessible for someone in a wheelchair or someone pushing a stroller. As a result, a small elevator was added to one side of the lobby. These types of barriers to access are increasingly being designed out of buildings. Mr. Piano, was there not a better solution?
Rubbing salt into Manhattanville’s wound (and a literal wound does exist on this landscape, as Columbia demolished and excavated entire city blocks) is the fact that these new buildings are not so dissimilar from other buildings the firm has done in New York City. How can Columbia’s buildings, and its campus, be said to address the needs of a specific community, while resembling other buildings with different needs and different communities? The Science Center and Center for the Arts both have orange-red elevator cores, as does The New York Times’ building midtown (evidently, Mr. Piano thinks tomato red is the appropriate color to assign to spaces associated with the vertical movement of people). The metal-ribbon cladding and narrow-slit windows of the University Forum—and how does making this building look like a battleship, or a jail, welcome the public to a place of discourse?—are extremely similar, if not the same, as the Whitney Museum in Chelsea.
This is not to say that Mr. Piano’s work isn’t beautiful (well, at least the Science Center and Center for the Arts). Mr. Piano is known for his masterful use of light and elegant technical details, and the glass facade of the Science Center is indeed stunningly airy and transparent. But these types of buildings feel best suited to glossy institutions.
What would make a local business owner, say, of an automobile repair shop, who has watched his neighbors fight and lose the right to stay on this land, want to walk through one of these buildings? Mr. Piano’s architecture doesn’t work hard to answer that question.
Instead, he makes us wonder: what makes a community?