I’ll Take Manhattanville: Greene Building Tour

I’LL TAKE MANHATTANVILLE:
DBB TOURS THE GREENE SCIENCE CENTER

HOSTED BY DESIGN DIALOGUES • SUMMER 2019

Joseph Navarro of Davis Brody Bond recent led a group of us on a tour of the recently-opened Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus in northern Manhattan. We toured the labs, classrooms, and public spaces; learned a bit about the history of Manhattanville and Columbia’s place in it; and marveled at the project’s exquisite interior and exterior detailing, worked out by design architect Renzo Piano Building Workshop in partnership with Davis Brody Bond. The tour ended at the roof, with its dramatic views of the Hudson River, Upper Manhattan, and the burgeoning Manhattanville site.

The Greene Science Center is the first phase and key hub of an urban academic environment covering 17 acres; when completed, the overall project will include more than 6.8 million square feet of space for teaching, research, underground parking, and support services featuring facilities for civic, cultural, recreational, and commercial activity. It will serve as the intellectual home for Columbia’s expanding research initiative in Mind, Brain and Behavior. The Center will include laboratories for Columbia scientists exploring the causal relationship between gene function, brain wiring, and behavior. This research will have profound implications for the treatment of brain illness—probing the root causes of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Motor Neuron diseases, among others. This research will also assist in decoding disorders of mood and motivation, cognition and behavior, such as autism, dementia, and schizophrenia.

A few of the (lovely) architectural details we studied in advance of our tour are pictured below.

Curtain wall details @ entry

Curtain wall details @ parapet

Curtain wall details (type 3)

Street canopy details