Broadway Opening

Nine years ago, Barnard College was in the midst of an identity crisis. The problem: it didn’t have one. Long in the shadow of Columbia University, just across Broadway in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, the women’s college now found itself a prisoner of its own hulking student center. McIntosh Center, designed by Vincent Kling in 1969, along with a neighboring 14-floor science tower, not only barricaded the school from the street with a two-story concrete wall; it choked off life on all other sides too, disrupting any sense that the slender campus was more than a hodgepodge of dimly connected buildings. To add insult to injury, McIntosh didn’t even offer much space in exchange for its heavy footprint, and student life was leaking across the street. The first time Judith Shapiro, Barnard’s former president, saw the building, she remembers saying, “What were they thinking? It looks like a cigar humidor.”

To stitch its beleaguered grounds back together, the school turned to Weiss/Manfredi Architects, a New York–based firm whose work willfully confuses architecture and landscape. Its best-known project to date is the Olympic Sculpture Park, in Seattle, which remade a forlorn parcel of industrial waterfront into the city’s eighth-most-visited attraction (ahead of the Frank Gehry–designed Experience Music Project and just behind the Seattle Seahawks). Using the simple form of a Z as connective tissue, it reattached the brownfield site, which had been marooned by a four-lane highway, to its Belltown neighborhood. Though the park is more than a built-up lawn, it isn’t full-blown architecture either. Barnard, a tiny urban campus, is a very different site, but there was a similar need for what the architects call “chameleon agendas”: playing the building off the site, and the site off the building. “The traditional campus has often been defined by quads and courtyards, with views all the way across that give an identity and an address for all the buildings on that green,” Marion Weiss says. “The sense of knowing where you are on that campus is tied to a landscape that holds it together.” With a few shrewd gestures, Weiss/Manfredi’s new $70 million, 100,000-square-foot building, the Diana Center, reinvents Barnard, giving a small college’s even smaller campus some room to breathe.

The husband-and-wife team of Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi have been working together for 21 years. They’re both architecture professors, and they sometimes speak as though they’ve just emerged from a graduate seminar. “Colors” become “chroma,” and they have “preoccupations” instead of “interests.” Manfredi describes their office of 25, in Manhattan’s Garment District, as “a studio, not a corporate office.” Still, the firm was short-listed this spring for a major competition to reframe the St. Louis Gateway Arch, which has only sharpened the architects’ sense of their own size. They’re up against Behnisch Architekten, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Peter Walker and Norman Foster, and SOM. “It’s a cast of big teams,” Manfredi says. Weiss says, “We’re the small and mighty team.”

In their office, a few of Weiss’s early, palm-sized paper models of the Diana hang on the wall, narrowing forms that anticipate the building’s final shape. “This was the first question,” Weiss says. “How do we connect? How do we taper? And how do we reveal?” She then points to a few muddled mock-ups produced soon after the first elegant paper cuts. “This is where we faced the music of the multiple floors,” she says. “Look how awful they are. The minute you start packing in all the program, it immediately falls apart.” Though Weiss and Manfredi are exceptionally good at smoothing the messy connections of a site, they don’t pretend their inspiration is divine. In Roman myth, Diana was the goddess of childbirth, and appropriately enough, her namesake building had its share of birthing pains.

The first task—the “taper” of Weiss’s model—was untangling the campus’s internal connections. Apart from closing off the school from Broadway, McIntosh’s bulk had separated Barnard’s historic northern end from its central outdoor space, Lehman Lawn. The Kling buildings also added a mountain of steps that ended in an elevated plaza, so Milbank Hall, the college’s first building, sat invisibly in a pit. “From the interior of the campus, you didn’t have a sense of what was going on,” says Lisa Gamsu, the college’s vice president for administration and capital planning. Instead of replicating McIntosh’s rectangular footprint, Weiss and Manfredi designed a wedge that tapers from 70 feet in the north to a slender, 45-foot-long southern face. Combined with a set of gently descending terraces that replace the isolating stairs, the wedge visually links the entire length of the campus. It’s the first time since Barnard moved to Morningside Heights in 1897 that one is able to see from the entry gate at West 117th Street to Milbank three blocks north.

With the shape of the building in mind, the architects still had to juggle a maddening variety of programs dispersed throughout seven narrow floors, while avoiding “the sorts of social separations that inevitably occur in vertically stacked buildings,” Weiss says. Barnard didn’t have the luxury of space. It had to fit its art and architecture departments, a black-box theater, an event space, dining facilities, and assorted classrooms, meeting rooms, faculty offices, and lounges into the Diana (which was named after Diana Vagelos, the Barnard alumna and trustee who, with her husband, Roy Vagelos, the former head of Merck, gave $15 million for the building). “One of the good things about having only a four-acre campus is that the buildings you build are not highly specialized,” Shapiro says. Weiss/Manfredi’s Robin Hood Foundation library at P.S. 42, in Queens, had already impressed Barnard’s trustees with the firm’s ability to design judiciously on a small scale. But at Barnard, the jumble of programs could have made for an intriguing mix or a confusing mess.