Broadway Opening

To connect the main levels—the second demand of the paper model—the architects made what Weiss calls “a landscape-scale move”: cutting a diagonal void of cascading atria into the building’s form. Since the stepped, glassed-in spaces are linked, students reading Adorno in the study room won’t feel cloistered from the café below, or Lehman Lawn beyond. “Big atriums are the empty spaces of the world,” Weiss says. “Nobody wants to be in them. So this whole idea of taking some of the generous spatial characteristics that an atrium has and packing it full of program and slipping it diagonally through a building gives you a totally different effect.”

With all that carefully orchestrated activity, it would have beeen a shame not to reveal it to the world—the final aim of the model. “Once we developed that general strategy to encourage different disciplines to see each other, different students to see different faculty members,” Manfredi says, “then it was just a question of wanting to mark that on the facade in a subtle way.” In place of the concrete wall on Broadway, the Diana’s facade reveals slices of the building through soft, nonreflective glass and hides others behind color-shifting bands. Playing to Barnard’s brick and terra-cotta and Columbia’s McKim, Mead and White neoclassicism, the glass and copper-anodized-aluminum panels link the Diana to its surrounding historic (and not so historic) buildings without aping them. “We tried to get a material that related chromatically but had its own chameleonlike quality,” Manfredi says. The muted-orange acid-etched glass, set five inches in front of back pans that are painted a vibrant red, is the first use of the material on a facade in the United States. It took a year of modeling, prototyping, and testing to get it right. Even then, the architects don’t know how the double-glass wall will look any given morning. The shade depends on the time of day and the weather: a passing cloud might coax an iridescent shimmer, and the late-afternoon sun can produce a deep, lustrous salmon wash.

On the western facade, which looks over Barnard’s interior, there’s a vertical version of the campus green that the college never had. “It seems like all the offhand encounters that happen on campus are focused when the weather’s nice, when you’re going to and from classes,” Weiss says. “And we realized in an urban campus, where you have verticality to deal with, that tends to come to an abrupt halt once you hit the elevators and staircases.” A wedge slice is popped out of the western facade, creating cantilevered stairs and walkways that act as a zigzagging counterpoint to the ladderlike atrium revealed on the east side. “One is sort of a revelatory diorama, like the movie Rear Window or something, and then the other side is active,” Weiss says.

Building serendipitous encounters into the architecture—that trope of modern design—became a particular obsession in the Diana. “Circulation is not just circulation,” Weiss says. “You can program it.” Hallways were made extra generous and fitted with benches and chairs, and the lobbies have ottomans for plopping down with a laptop. But students (who refer to the Diana by the cheerfully obscene name “the Vag”) have grumbled that the transparency and bustling corridors sometimes make the Diana a difficult place to work: the automatic shades don’t block enough sunlight for slide-heavy classes, the carpet along the atria spaces is too bright, and the interior glass walls can feel like a fishbowl. Rolando Rodriguéz, a Columbia sophomore studying architecture, says, “It’s a little distracting, the movement around me. I really appreciate the glass—but maybe not have that exposure in the study room.” Lucy Hunter, a Barnard sophomore majoring in art history, says, “I have a problem with the ambient noise, and I’m not sure the color is conducive to studying. I’d put in blue.” (Anticipating student feedback, the architects deliberately left the interior only partly furnished to accommodate changing needs.)

For the college, having its students on display is clearly the point. The writer Anna Quindlen, a Barnard alumna and the outgoing chairwoman of the board of trustees, writes in an e-mail, “During the day it looks like one of those ant colonies you had as a kid: a transparent vertical plane inside of which people eat, study, read, talk, walk. It’s like a lab of life.” And a marquee project on Broadway is more than just an advertisement for the school; it’s a rallying cry. “Because of its history as a sister school, there’s an assumption that it was part of Columbia in a way that, in fact, it was not,” says Gamsu, the Barnard VP. “It had its own board, always. It did not and does not receive financial support from Columbia. For Barnard’s identity, I think it was important to do this and declare our independence in a way.”

Just as important as transforming Barnard’s relationship with the city and Columbia was giving students a renewed sense of their campus. “We’re interested not just in breaking down physical dividers, as we were in Seattle,” Weiss says, “but breaking down the social and intellectual dividers that you would expect in any kind of campus building that might have sciences over here, arts over here, and food and dining over there, and performance over there.” The violinlike event space, with its makore panels and slipped upper plane, may be large and attract attention, but the Diana is about the small delights of a small campus. The architects seem equally proud of a slender mirror in the atria that hides a structural connection, or a brick switchback that gently guides students to savor the landscape. “We’re interested in the sequence, how people traverse either a site or a building, and the idea that the fastest way is not the most pleasurable,” Manfredi says. “In the end, the building’s not real big, the space isn’t real big, so we’re trying to find ways in which you can just be a little more seduced, slow the journey down a bit.”