Barnard College's Milstein Center: A Dance of Cantilevers and Braces

Barnard, founded as Columbia's “sister school” in 1889, when the university was all-male, remains an affiliated, semi-independent liberal-arts college for women, occupying a space across Broadway from the main Morningside Heights campus. Barnard in some respects is Columbia in microcosm, and the replacement of its small library in 2018 with an up-to-date multidisciplinary facility doubling its predecessor's capacity, the Cheryl and Philip Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning, called for a delicate balance between tradition and futurism, a pirouette executed in a small space.

Barnard's facilities have expanded on its early-20th-century Beaux-Arts masonry buildings by McKim, Mead & White, Charles A. Rich, and Arnold Brunner to include more modern structures, including a 14-story Brutalist science tower adjacent to Milstein, Altschul Hall (Vincent Kling, 1969) and the multipurpose, multi-award-winning Diana Center (Weiss/Manfredi, 2010). The heart of the four-acre campus is Lehman Lawn, making sunlight preservation a high priority and ruling out another simple extruded-rectangle tower. Tunnels connect Barnard's academic buildings, so that in winter, “you could travel in your pajamas from your dorm room to any of your classes,” says technical design partner Carrie Moore of SOM. Preserving this circulation system during construction without disruption, she continues, was an important component of the planning of Milstein. Barnard “has a lot of developable area per zoning, as of right,” she says, “but they don't have the space to develop all of it, unless you fill in the lawn or get creative” about linking new and old buildings.

The 11-story, 128,000-square-foot Milstein rests on Manhattan schist, wedged between Altschul on the north (see Image 5) and the annex to Barnard Hall, a historic building protected by the State Historic Preservation Office, to the immediate south. Moore notes that Milstein leverages existing campus assets to maximize programs within the available space and “distill down the program to what was essential, not duplicative.” The building connects to Altschul by a skybridge at the fifth floor and to the Diana Center below grade, allowing access to laboratories and arts facilities along with Milstein's own liberal-arts classrooms and multimedia facilities (a technology suite dubbed the Digital Commons).

Photo courtesy of © Magda Biernat Photography

Image 5: Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning, Barnard College, Columbia University, among neighboring Altschul Hall (right, rear) and Diana Center (right, foreground).

Four setback terraces add green space, and the eighth floor includes a faculty lounge with panoramic views from the Hudson to midtown Manhattan. Rated LEED Silver, the building is integrated into the campus's central utility plant and is designed to save energy costs by 15 percent below ASHRAE 90.1 2007 standards, along with saving 33 percent in water, reusing half for landscape irrigation.

Photo courtesy of © Magda Biernat Photography

Image 6: Milstein Center’s terraces overlooking Barnard’s Lehman Lawn.

Moore describes the parti for Milstein as highly contextually responsive. “We intentionally pursued developing the height that was allowable for it to have a relationship to the Altschul Building, which is incredibly tall on that campus... and then intentionally extending out the library space to occupy the larger footprint. It's almost like a variation of a tower on a base, if you will, but really responsive to the site constraints, so aligning it to the Altschul tower and then liberating the podium component of it, to really leverage the daylight on the lawn and to have views from the library out to the lawn from every level” (see Image 6).

Along with seismic and wind forces, there is also soil pressure to contend with, notes Victoria Ponce de Leon, structural engineer at Silman, since there is a height difference between the lawn and Claremont Avenue to the west. Under these site constraints, “it became pretty clear early on that we were going to move forward with a steel structural system, because we were going to cantilever the building over an existing building,” she says. “That's one of the unique ways that we were able to take up space that wasn't available on the ground floor, and also do so without putting columns through the existing building where there were pathways that would obstruct student flow through the space in the final condition....That's what led us down the path of a steel structure: it gave us that maximum flexibility.”

The design team chose exposed braces over moment frames for lightness and economy. Describing the steel lateral brace frames in the double-height library, Ponce de Leon recalls visiting the building shortly after its opening. “Someone was sitting within the U-frame, which is what we lovingly call it,” she says, “and for me as a structural engineer, it was lovely to see someone interacting directly with something that is normally hidden” (see Image 7).

The load-bearing members are not the only important metallic components in Milstein. A rainscreen system of patinated zinc departs from Barnard's dominant brick facade tradition while complementing its color, not “trying to replicate it, but make a nod towards it,” Moore says, “leaning into more current and future-looking materials.” The patina will change gradually over time, reflecting a recognition that the building and the school will change as well. “In discussions related to embodied carbon,” Ponce de Leon adds, “one of the greenest things to do is adaptively reuse buildings, so from that perspective, it's a steel building; it can be easily modified for future use.”

Photo courtesy of © Jorg Meyer Photography

Image 7: U-braces in Milstein Center.

Moore notes that Milstein has struck its users as a natural fit rather than a drastic change. “People actually felt like the building had always been there,” she says. “Students gravitate towards it because it offers so many different opportunities for study space in terms of collaborative spaces, quiet spaces, individual spaces.” Many, she reports, have given it a rare compliment for a new addition to a distinct and beloved campus: “'It feels like it's been here this whole time.'”