Renzo Piano's Forum Opens
John Hill
27. September 2018
All photographs by John Hill/World-Architects
Columbia University opened The Forum, the third building designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop on its new Manhattanville campus, on Wednesday, September 26th.
Actually The Forum is the third building, period, on Columbia's Manhattanville campus, following Piano's Jerome L. Greene Science Center and Lenfest Center for the Arts, both of which opened last year. Piano likes to discuss the three buildings as integral to the humanities: science, art, and community. Greene houses Columbia's neuroscience institute, Lenfest has spaces for performance and exhibition, and now The Forum is set to host academic conferences and other events.
Design architect Piano, who worked on the building with Dattner Architects and Caples Jefferson Architects, was one of numerous speakers at yesterday's formal opening. Responsible for the campus masterplan as well as the design of its first three buildings, Piano has been on the job for sixteen years, just as long as Columbia President Lee Bollinger, who Piano described as "the driving force" behind the "big miracle" that is the Manhattanville campus.
Piano's remarks were short, opting to let the architecture speak for itself. Afterwards he gave a brief tour to a group of press assembled for the opening. Below are some highlights from that tour around the new building.
First some orientation: this view from the elevated subway platform shows The Forum in front of glassy Greene with Lenfest's blue metal panels peeking out at left. The Forum is a three-story building with a large auditorium behind the precast concrete facade on the right, and offices and meeting spaces behind the glass facade at left. Piano likens the building to a ship pointing to the Hudson River beyond the viaduct at far left.
This pointing is clear in the triangular shape of the building: wide at the east, auditorium end and narrow at the glass tip on the west.
As in all the buildings completed or in the works for the Manhattanville campus, the highly transparent ground floor of The Forum is given over to public uses, such as a cafe and an information center. Here we see the tapered space on the ground floor.
Renzo Piano, standing at the "prow" of The Forum on the ground floor, speaking about the relationship between it and the earlier Greene and Lenfest buildings.
Upstairs, the building's prow is given over to a sun-drenched office space that will probably be occupied by Columbia World Projects, a new initiative "that aims to bring university research systematically out into the world in the form of projects that will have a significant and lasting positive impact on people's lives."
Although The Forum looks grey on the outside, inside it is saturated with color, such as in the orange carpeting on the second floor.
The small windows in the precast concrete panels still bring in plenty of natural light.
The windows at the corner of 125th Street and Broadway (visible over the entrance in the top photo) look out to the structure of the elevated subway. This space serves as spillover from the auditorium.
The auditorium is relatively frugal, with walls made from split-face concrete blocks. Combined with the precast concrete walls on the facades, the auditorium's two layers of concrete shield it from the sounds and vibrations of passing trains.
