Columbia Business School
Architect: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, FXCollaborative
Location: New York, USA
Type: Educational
Year: 2022
Photographs: Iwan Baan
The following description is courtesy of the architects. Columbia Business School’s new home spans approximately 492,000 square feet across two buildings that reflect the fast-paced, high-tech, and highly social character of business in the 21st century. The two new facilities, Henry R. Kravis Hall and David Geffen Hall, double the School’s current square footage, creating multifunctional spaces that foster a sense of community—spaces where students, faculty, alumni, and practitioners can gather to exchange ideas. The design of both buildings recognizes that creativity, innovation, and communication—skills often nurtured in informal environments—are as crucial to business school pedagogy as the traditional, quantitative skills taught in a classroom. The building organization shuffles alternating floors of faculty offices with student learning spaces in the eleven-story Kravis Hall and floors for administrative offices and learning spaces in the eight-story Geffen Hall. The shuffled program is expressed in each building’s façade with systems tailored to the populations and uses. The school’s internal spaces are organized around intersecting networks of circulation and collaborative learning environments that extend up vertically through each building, linking spaces of teaching, socializing, and studying, to create a continuous space of learning and interaction that remains vibrant 24 hours a day.
Engagement with the city and surrounding West Harlem community is a fundamental aspect of the new
Columbia Business School’s design. Kravis Hall offers 360 degrees of exposure and proximity to the
Hudson River. At the same time, Geffen Hall establishes a strong connection to the urban fabric of the
neighborhood and the mid-block pedestrian axis of the Manhattanville master plan. Every classroom
provides a view of the city and landscape. The two buildings also welcome in the community, including a
new dedicated space on the second floor of Geffen Hall for the Columbia-Harlem Small Business
Development Center that will build on the school’s ten-year history of supporting local entrepreneurs. A
40,000 square-foot public park and new retail spaces—including a café featuring local products—also
connect Columbia Business School more closely with the surrounding neighborhood.
Major Features
The Network: As the connective tissue of the school, the Network links the primary programs of each
building with a generous circulation stair that carves through each building volume, bringing daylight and
air into the center of the deep floor plates. The Network links a myriad of intimate lounges, flexible
seminar spaces, open-breakout, tiered seating, carrels, and informal hang-out spaces into a new type of
academic space. The circulation stairs wind their way through the buildings directly adjacent to a central
bank of 7 elevators that provide access to all floors. A custom wallpaper designed by Diller Scofidio +
Renfro lines the elevator banks of student floors, depicting an abstract pattern of four New York City
bridges – the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, Hell Gate Bridge and the Harlem River Lift
Bridge – as an ode to the city’s infrastructural connections.
Ground Floors: The ground floors of each building provide a porous connection to the surrounding city
streets and the broader Manhattanville campus. Each building meets the ground with a social and event
space. These event spaces establish a strong visual and programmatic link across the publicly accessible
central Square to create one school from two buildings. A café on the ground level of Geffen Hall and
retail space located on the ground floor of Kravis Hall at 12th Avenue establish further connections
between Columbia Business School and the surrounding neighborhood.
Level 1, Samberg Commons at Kravis Hall: This urban-scale living room for students, faculty, and staff
features tiered, undulating seating made of oak that provides an area for multiple group study, breakout
meetings, or a place to enjoy lunch. The tiered seating can accommodate 200 with a direct connection to
a dining space on Level 2 with an additional capacity of 199.
Level 1, Cooperman Commons in Geffen Hall: This auditorium space can accommodate 274 and acts as
a day-to-day gathering space for student orientations and faculty meetings.
Level 2, Columbia-Harlem Small Business Development Center in Geffen Hall: The space provides support resources and services to local businesses and entrepreneurs.
Level 3, Multi-Function Room in Geffen Hall: This ample enclosed space is sub-divisible into two
smaller rooms for functions of different sizes. An adjacent pre-function space serves as a lobby anteroom
that can also be used independently. These spaces act as a conference center with the capability to
quickly transform to suit different layouts.
Level 4, Student Social Lounge in Kravis Hall: The lounge includes a screening room, game room, and
casual dining spaces where students can relax and unwind.
Level 10, Dining Room in Kravis Hall: Lined with walnut wood paneling, this event space can
accommodate 238 and provides a panoramic view toward the George Washington Bridge, with access to
an outdoor terrace.
Innovative classrooms: Classroom floors provide natural daylight and views to New York City with the
option to calibrate privacy and daylight control. 25-, 50-, 74-, and 150-seat classrooms provide diverse
configuration capabilities for use in break-out, negotiation, or experiential learning scenarios. From the
onset of the design in 2011, classroom technology was devised to enable remote teaching for Columbia’s
affiliates from around the world, which is a central part of their international program. Cameras and
microphones distributed throughout all classrooms and confidence monitors for presenters enable
seamless video conferencing that simulates the professor-student dynamics of in-person learning. The design also anticipated the need for increased display space, converting a majority of the non-glazed walls
into projection surfaces.
Quiet Study Rooms: These spaces for serene, comfortable, individual study are outfitted with soft
furniture seating approximately 100.
Group Study Rooms: Located throughout both buildings on the classroom floors, a series of similarly
sized rooms can accommodate groups of six and are equipped with small conference tables, fixed
monitors, marker boards, and web conferencing technology. The study rooms line the network stairs of
the building cores and are clustered around 74-seat classrooms, serving a dual function as breakout
rooms while classes are in session.
Technical Features
Façade: The building’s skin expresses the shuffling of students, faculty, and administrative spaces.
Student floors, the Network, and ground floor spaces utilize transparent glass exteriors inset from the
edge of the floor plate, while Faculty floors utilize fritted glass. Each building façade features a custom
curtainwall system and is regularized based on the geometry of the exterior building form. Geffen Hall’s
glass envelope is treated with a gradient from opaque to transparent, each panel having a bespoke and
carefully calculated frit pattern.
Structure: Structural solutions designed in collaboration with Arup support the architectural concept of
both buildings. In Kravis Hall, “skip truss” steel framing utilized on alternating faculty floors keeps open
student floors with nearly column-free classrooms, as well as the building’s layered, textured form.
Spiraling, sculptural circulation stairs in Kravis Hall and Geffen Hall double as vertical elements of the
structure while fostering interactions between users and providing panoramic views over the campus and
New York City.
Sustainability: Columbia Business School expects to achieve LEED v3 Gold certification. Knowing that
students and faculty will spend long hours in the building, a particular emphasis has been placed on the
quality of the indoor environment—specifically air, light, thermal comfort, and materials. The use of low-
VOC materials, flushout before occupancy, increased ventilation rates, and outdoor air monitoring
ensures high indoor air quality. Materials were specified with high percentages of recycled content from
regional sources. Most of the wood was sourced from sustainably managed forests. The building
enclosure has been developed to protect against unwanted glare, and the white frit blocks harmful solar
heat gain. The cooling and heating systems utilize chilled beam technology for user comfort and reduced
energy consumption and low-velocity underfloor distribution in the tiered classrooms. High-efficiency
plumbing fixtures are used to reduce potable water demand.
Project Details
- Location: Columbia Business School is located on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus in West Harlem, nine blocks north of Columbia’s historic Morningside Heights campus. The 17-acre campus is also home to the Lenfest Center for the Arts, the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, and The Forum, all designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, as well as a public park designed by James Corner Field Operations.
- Owner / Client: Columbia University
Milestones
- 2010 Columbia University launches international design competition to design a new home for the Columbia Business School on two sites in Manhattanville.
- 2011 Columbia University selects a team led by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
- 2016 Construction begins onsite.
- 2019 The structures of both buildings are completed, topping out at their full height.
- 2022 Construction is completed. Kravis Hall and Geffen Hall are opened to students and faculty.
Design Team
- Architects: Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with FXCollaborative
- Sustainability/ LEED consultant: FXCollaborative
- Structural Engineer, Exterior Envelope and Façade Consultant: Arup
- Associate Architect (Dedicated Dining, Multi-Function Room): Aaris Design Studios
- Mechanical Engineer: Buro Happold
- Construction Manager: Turner Construction
- Lighting Design: Tillotson Design Associates
- Acoustics: Cerami & Associates
- Vertical Transportation: Van Deusen and Associates
- Civil Engineering: Stantec Consultants
- AV: Cerami & Associates, The Clarient Group, Jaffe Holden
- IT: The Clarient Group, Jaros Baum & Bolles
- Security: DVS Security Consulting and Engineering
- Food Services: Romano Gatland
- Cost Consulting: Dharam Consulting
- Code: Milrose
- Graphics and Wayfinding: Pentagram
