Urban Academic Buildings
Learning Objectives:
- Assess the distinct requirements of academic buildings and the conditions of urban environments, noting contrasting campus models for urban universities with different degrees of separation from neighboring nonacademic space.
- Analyze the experiences described in the case studies at major urban universities and apply that knowledge to future projects with comparable settings and missions.
- Identify the properties of structural steel that have addressed the challenges of complex programs, environmental effects, interdisciplinary flexibility, control of vibration and acoustics, and tight construction sites where work proceeds amid ongoing academic and research activity.
- Design academic facilities that accommodate the goals, challenges, and uncertainties of 21st-century higher-education institutions
Credits:
This course is approved as a Structured Course
This course can be self-reported to the AANB, as per their CE Guidelines
Approved for structured learning
Approved for Core Learning
This course can be self-reported to the NLAA
Course may qualify for Learning Hours with NWTAA
Course eligible for OAA Learning Hours
This course is approved as a core course
This course can be self-reported for Learning Units to the Architectural Institute of British Columbia
Urban universities frequently find themselves in paradoxical positions of simultaneous influence and constraint. Their status as purposeful communities within a city's wider social, cultural, and economic context makes them a unique category of client for architects, with complex programs that often superimpose different building functions within close quarters, offering opportunities that call for high degrees of design ingenuity.
Photo courtesy of Connie Zhou / JBSA Images
The Mercer Street academic podium facade of New York University’s John A. Paulson Center.
As major employers, talent magnets, and land stewards in dense cities, universities can be powerful engines of local economic and cultural reinvention; along with the hospital sector (either as university components or as neighbors) and the private spinoff firms that academic research often generates, they drive the “eds and meds” economy that many observers see as essential to the well-being of communities and the nation. The flip side of that condition is the inevitable entanglement in gentrification controversies and town-gown disputes involving socioeconomic class and displacement, which are particularly intense in cities where economies based in traditional manufacturing have retreated over the past half-century or so (see Mallach, particularly Chapters 3-5). And, unlike academic institutions located in smaller towns with pastoral campuses and affordable land available nearby for expansion, an urban university is nearly always spatially hemmed in.
A university's distinctness from its surrounding community is not a given but a variable. The built environments of urban academic institutions fall into a spectrum of patterns, depending on relations with neighbors and internal and civic policy choices regarding the quality of student and faculty life, personnel recruitment, security, expansion, and other considerations. At one end of the continuum are self-contained universities essentially replicating the pastoral-campus model through walled and gated designs that concentrate academic and research activity internally, dedicating part of the host city exclusively to the school. At the other end, a university can be structured as an overlay on a city's street grid, opening its buildings to ground-floor retail and its quads, pathways, performance spaces, lecture halls, and athletic facilities to the nonacademic population.
Few schools occupy positions at the extremes of this spectrum, and the logic of the eds-and-meds economy arguably favors a shift from the enclave model toward greater public permeability. One major urban university, whose full official name underscores this relationship, Columbia University in the City of New York, is in the midst of a major expansion, adding an entirely new campus a short walk from its traditional location, with the explicit goal of enacting such a shift.
When universities seek new facilities to accommodate growth in programs or scale, the physical expression of town-gown relations and policy decisions inevitably becomes the concern of architects and planners. An academic building is often a high-profile project for a firm, with institutional prestige contributing to visibility. Conversely, major universities frequently (perhaps increasingly) seek the cachet associated with memorable building profiles and boldface-name firms. Functionality, however, remains the foremost concern in most academic construction, particularly when urban spatial limitations imply that a multipurpose building will be preferable to several separate facilities answering the different needs of these complex institutions.
Architects planning such buildings frequently need to combine classrooms; libraries; laboratories; residences; faculty and administrative offices; gathering spaces for students, faculty, and sometimes non-university-affiliated visitors; facilities for the performing arts, visual arts, athletics, and other specialized activities; and outdoor space with at least some vegetation, often a component in short supply in urban neighborhoods (see Images 1 and 2). Today's universities also maintain high standards for the environmental performance of their facilities, being centers for research and scholarship related to the climate crisis, including strategies for its mitigation and societal adaptation to it.
The conditions affecting any type of urban construction and building operations —high population density, availability of public transit, neighbors with concerns over a new building's physical encroachment or its effect on local economic variables—can pose particularly tricky balancing acts in an academic building. One may encounter scenarios where a science laboratory containing delicate equipment must cope with vibrations from a subway nearby, or where a heavy building component such as a dormitory tower is to be placed above an athletic facility that must remain column-free to preserve openness, or where a university's need to respond to changing student interest in different academic programs requires building designs flexible enough to accommodate future changes, foreseeable and unforeseeable. Major academic institutions in New York City and Philadelphia have added buildings in recent years that respond to these and other challenges through design innovations and appropriate choices of materials (see Case Studies). All these projects reflect their institutions’ increasing appreciation of how buildings with contemporary sustainable features and technologies, located on dense urban sites accessible by public transit, make efficient use of energy as well as land.
CONCLUSION
A critical difference between urban and non-urban universities—a background factor that can bear on planning and design decisions—is that the former rarely dominate their communities as thoroughly as the latter do. In many smaller cities that host universities, a large land-grant university or a smaller, perhaps prestigious private college is the largest player in town with regard to employment and land-use policies. In a larger city, a university is one institution among many, though some have exercised political and economic power that applies to controversies over eminent domain (Bagli, Fels et al., Kiley). It's possible for an educational institution to win a battle over a particular project or site but lose the longer-range war for public goodwill.
It's also possible for them to reframe their relations with their host cities as something other than conflict. Win-win partnerships between a school and a city over a new construction project can benefit the university, the local population, the municipal public sector, the regional business community, the civic infrastructure, and even the planet, since universities generate research and ideas pertaining to environmental resilience and sustainable practices. New components of an academic built environment appear within these interlocking contexts and can be instruments of progress, community remediation, reputational improvement, and institutional planning. Architects designing such buildings often achieve the best results by operating with a detailed awareness of how complex the settings usually are (physically and otherwise) and how rewarding a carefully-thought-through construction project can be.
NYU's Paulson Center: Interwoven Neighborhoods in a Single Building
The new 14-story multipurpose building for New York University (NYU) in Greenwich Village, collaboratively designed by Davis Brody Bond (DBB) and Kieran Timberlake (KT), combines functions that in a non-urban campus might be distributed across at least five different buildings: classrooms, social space, athletics, the performing arts, and housing for students and faculty. Blending these programs within tight boundaries, with I.M. Pei and James Ingo Freed's Silver Towers residential complex (built from 1964 to 1967, landmarked in 2008) right next door, Paulson Center executes feats of spatial gymnastics that only a steel frame could make possible. A building that might easily have become a Frankenstein's monster turns out to resemble an internally coherent academic ecosystem.
“NYU's square footage per student,” notes KT partner Richard Maimon, is “roughly half of its peer institutions',” requiring extremely efficient allocation of functions to space. The university's Plan 2031, announced in 2010, called for a 3-million-square-foot expansion in the area (Paulson provides 735,000 of those square feet). Neighbors including the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation have expressed concerns through the city's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), community-board activities, and other channels that the school has been overwhelming the Village. Whatever the university chose to do with this site would inevitably come under close external scrutiny.
At the same time, NYU's programs have outgrown subpar quarters. Housing in this area is notoriously scarce and costly, the university's athletic facilities were antiquated, and space for classrooms, offices, gatherings, and arts infrastructure was cramped. Faculty at the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, notes DBB partner William Paxson, have been “doing most of their teaching out of rented theater spaces and studios, and they didn't actually ever have a proscenium theater on the campus with a full fly tower.”
Photo courtesy of MDavis Brody Bond / KieranTimberlake
Image 1: NYU’s Paulson Center, full building section, looking west.
The Paulson Center's Iris Cantor Theatre, seating 350, remedies this shortcoming. The building also adds two smaller flexible theaters with capacities around 150, the African Grove Theatre (named in honor of the nation's first Black theater, which operated on the same site in the 1820s) and the Warehouse Theatre, plus an orchestral rehearsal room, and replaces the single-story Coles Gymnasium, its predecessor on the site, with a basement gym complex that includes four basketball/volleyball courts (using movable seating for varsity games) and a pool. Athletic facilities are also available to the public, requiring careful thought to circulation through security checkpoints from the street. All these large-volume components call for long spans and major load transfers, since the programs placed on top of them, particularly the two housing towers, create substantial dead and live loads, and columns through any of them, particularly the theaters and gym, would be undesirable (see Image 3).
“We were exploring not only the plan, but the volumetric aspects of it,” Maimon recalls; “at the same time as that, we had a zoning envelope via the ULURP process that described the maximum massing that could be achieved.” The key to organizing the building's components, he says, was “reversing convention and putting circulation at the perimeter of the building, so rather than dark hallways between program spaces in the public parts of the building, [on] the first five floors, you're effectively walking the perimeter. It's naturally lit, it affords views, and from that, gives a sense of your placement in the city and that sense of wayfinding. And in so doing, we created these neighborhoods within the building...it's like the city unto itself in the building.” Brian Falconer, principal at Severud Associates Consulting Engineers, adds that perimeter circulation confers another advantage: “The heavy structure was also pulled in on the building, so all of the perimeter structure is really pretty light.”
Falconer identifies Paulson's principal engineering challenge: “How do you put a performing arts center on top of four basketball courts, and then how do you put a student housing tower on top of that?” The solutions were different at the north and south ends of the building. To the north, trusses span 135 feet over the courts, supporting the performing arts center; three deep trusses are hidden between the first and second floors, and a fourth is at the fifth floor, with the second through fourth floors hung off it, creating a large open area, the first-floor north lobby. The four trusses add up to 1,400 tons of steel; total steel tonnage on the project, he reports, is 14,690 tons.
“On the south side,” Falconer continues, “we took a completely different approach...rather than trying to go all the way over both the pool and the proscenium theater, they actually are arranged in a cruciform, and what we did is we located four columns in the corners of the cruciform and snuck those columns all the way down over, beside the proscenium theater and then beside the pool into the basement, so that we shortened up the transfers on that side as much as we could, instead of making a really large transfer area.” The structural demands simplified the choice of materials, he adds: “So much was transferred on this job that there was no way it was going to be anything but steel. If it was a two-story building, maybe we would have done something in wood, but a building of this scale, with this many transfers, there was no way it wasn't going to be a steel structure.”
Photo courtesy of MDavis Brody Bond / KieranTimberlake
Image 2: NYU’s Paulson Center, view from above and northeast, showing green terraces.
The building rests on “about 50 or 60 feet of soil on top of the Manhattan rock,” Falconer adds, and with the groundwater table some 25 feet below grade, the construction team drilled caissons through the soil to the rock and built a bathtub to exclude water. North and south basement walls from the old Coles Gymnasium were integrated into the earth retention system, since there wasn't space to put in a new system beyond the property line. Paulson uses a hybrid structural frame with steel columns and beams plus a precast plank system, with 225,000 total square feet of precast; for vibration isolation and acoustic separation—both critical in a performing arts building with subways nearby under Houston Street amid loose vibratory soil—foundations for the southernmost two-thirds of the building are placed on an isolation layer, aided by false floors and double walls for musical and theatrical spaces, thanks to acousticians Jaffe Holden aiding Falconer's team. Both residential towers use a girder-slab system where steel beams are laid into precast concrete decks; “it was lighter like a concrete-on-metal deck system would be,” Falconer reports, “and allowed us to fit in more floors in the same amount of height for the building, and kept it lighter for the transfers over the athletic and art spaces beneath.” The building includes 85 plate girders totaling 2,400 tons and three columns over 50 tons each.
The combination of visible perimeter circulation, soft lighting (designed by specialist Suzan Tillotson to spare neighbors disruptive brightness by night), and an envelope whose curtain walls are rhythmically textured with angled “wedge panels,” with south-facing opaque portions to optimize solar control, gives Paulson a lively, constantly varying exterior profile. Paxson notes that the multiple programs are appropriate for a neighborhood that never sleeps: “There are some real benefits to a mixed-use building: more work on the part of the design team, but in terms of utilization, of a building being active...classrooms are very active from 8 o'clock to 5 o'clock, Monday to Friday, but performing arts are open at night; student housing is a 24/7 activity. I think we feel that that's one takeaway: that universities shouldn't just master-plan one use on one site.”
In an era when some institutions deploy the term "community" as loosely as any buzzword, the KT/DBB team has thought through the details of how to foster genuine communities and juxtapose them purposefully. Actors-in-training will cross paths with athletes within the building; students and professors from all academic programs will use the 58 general-purpose classrooms and the spacious commons detailed with curvaceous American ash; citizens unaffiliated with NYU will attend public events, a possible step toward less fractious town-gown relations. Dormitories in the students' tower, comparing favorably with local rental apartments, have controlled access and, beginning in fall 2023, faculty “fellows in residence” and affiliated mentors on the Ivy League residential-college model. Faculty apartments in the separate tower (“the one part of the building that's not interconnected in terms of the access,” notes Maimon) have their own amenities, roof terrace, and entrance at Houston and Mercer, undoubtedly an aid to recruitment and retention.
Photo courtesy of MDavis Brody Bond / KieranTimberlake
Image 3: Cellar axonometric, Paulson Center, showing columnfree four-court gymnasium (#2, right).
Photo courtesy of MDavis Brody Bond / KieranTimberlake
Image 4: Facade of Paulson Center includes “wedge panels” among features controlling daylighting and solar gain.
Like practically any major university's new construction, Paulson presents a forward-thinking environmental profile. Aiming to meet LEED Gold standards, the building draws on NYU's cogeneration plant a few blocks away, dispensing with redundant boilers, chillers, and other MEP components; it reuses its own waste heat in desiccant dehumidification, with a high rate of outdoor air entering the building and aiding indoor air-quality control: a must in any athletic facility, particularly in New York summers. Further green details include cistern stormwater storage, multiple vegetated roofs, and fritted glazing (not only reducing solar gain but visible to birds, planned well in advance of New York Local Law 15 of 2020 mandating bird-strike reduction). “We had a significant reduction in energy use in the base design of this building that was over 20 percent reduction of code,” Maimon says, “anticipating New York City requirements going forward.”
Commissioning required by the LEED process will test Paulson's real-life energy performance, while non-university Villagers' responses, and perhaps use of its public-facing program components, will test the proposition that NYU's relation to its city is more symbiotic than some of its aggressive critics claim. Operating a research university in Manhattan requires many forms of agility; the structural aspect of this balancing act is at least as impressive as the diplomatic one.
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