Renzo Piano's Forum Opens

27. September 2018

All photographs by John Hill/World-Architects

Columbia University opened The Forum, the third building designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop on its new Manhattanville campus, on Wednesday, September 26th.

First some orientation: this view from the elevated subway platform shows The Forum in front of glassy Greene with Lenfest's blue metal panels peeking out at left. The Forum is a three-story building with a large auditorium behind the precast concrete facade on the right, and offices and meeting spaces behind the glass facade at left. Piano likens the building to a ship pointing to the Hudson River beyond the viaduct at far left.

This pointing is clear in the triangular shape of the building: wide at the east, auditorium end and narrow at the glass tip on the west.

As in all the buildings completed or in the works for the Manhattanville campus, the highly transparent ground floor of The Forum is given over to public uses, such as a cafe and an information center. Here we see the tapered space on the ground floor.

Renzo Piano, standing at the "prow" of The Forum on the ground floor, speaking about the relationship between it and the earlier Greene and Lenfest buildings.

Upstairs, the building's prow is given over to a sun-drenched office space that will probably be occupied by Columbia World Projects, a new initiative "that aims to bring university research systematically out into the world in the form of projects that will have a significant and lasting positive impact on people's lives."

Although The Forum looks grey on the outside, inside it is saturated with color, such as in the orange carpeting on the second floor.

The small windows in the precast concrete panels still bring in plenty of natural light.

The windows at the corner of 125th Street and Broadway (visible over the entrance in the top photo) look out to the structure of the elevated subway. This space serves as spillover from the auditorium.

The auditorium is relatively frugal, with walls made from split-face concrete blocks. Combined with the precast concrete walls on the facades, the auditorium's two layers of concrete shield it from the sounds and vibrations of passing trains.

Both stairs and elevators sit behind glass walls facing Greene. Accordingly, Piano treated each with color: elevators are red while stairs are yellow. Although the latter are utilitarian, the bright colors and daylight make them more inviting than the elevators.