Kris
October 4th, 2003, 09:23 PM
October 5, 2003
Barnard Plans to Replace Student Center
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Barnard College is about to transform a drab strip of upper Broadway with a student center that will enclose a multifloor library, a cafe and an indoor garden.
Construction is scheduled to begin in August 2005. The six-story, 110,000-square-foot building will provide four new floors of badly needed space on the 4.5-acre campus, college officials said. It will replace the Millicent McIntosh Center, a two-story cafeteria and meeting place of 1960's design.
"The closet door just wasn't closing anymore," said Suzanne Trimel, Barnard's vice president for public affairs.
The building will be the first new construction on campus in 15 years. Its estimated cost is $45 million, with $10 million raised to date in donations from trustees and alumni, Ms. Trimel said. The college may borrow to cover some of the remaining cost, but college officials said they were still hoping for more gifts.
The college is well placed financially to borrow, Ms. Trimel said. It lived frugally in the 1990's and recently received a positive review from Moody's, the financial rating agency. It had a record fund-raising year, raising $25 million.
The college chose Weiss/Manfredi, a New York architecture firm known for its design of the Women's Memorial and Education Center at Arlington National Cemetery. The design features an open space and an indoor garden on many levels. Part of the building's exterior will be transparent, allowing views of the interior from Broadway. The rest will be built of a material that resembles the brick of the campus's older buildings.
Barnard's president, Judith Shapiro, said the see-through center would brighten the edge of the campus, which runs along Broadway.
The 1960's building that now stands "gave the college a look of a maximum-security prison, really heavy and lurking," Dr. Shapiro said during a telephone interview on Friday. "The idea is to combine some real transparence to the outside with a lot of enclosed and intimate space."
The new student center will house a library, a cafe, seminar rooms and common space. It will include a 900-seat auditorium. Currently, the only large gathering place on campus is the gymnasium. Students will be able to send e-mail from computers in the building, and the roof will also have seating space.
"You'll see a lot of action and a lot of things going on," Ms. Trimel said. "It's considerably bigger than what is there now."
But despite its size, the building will not "be a tower," Dr. Shapiro said. "It won't feel like Wall Street. It will be the living center for what life is all about in a liberal arts college."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/images/newnews/nexus.jpg
http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/images/newnews/nexus2.jpg
http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/newnews/news100203b.html
Barnard Plans to Replace Student Center
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Barnard College is about to transform a drab strip of upper Broadway with a student center that will enclose a multifloor library, a cafe and an indoor garden.
Construction is scheduled to begin in August 2005. The six-story, 110,000-square-foot building will provide four new floors of badly needed space on the 4.5-acre campus, college officials said. It will replace the Millicent McIntosh Center, a two-story cafeteria and meeting place of 1960's design.
"The closet door just wasn't closing anymore," said Suzanne Trimel, Barnard's vice president for public affairs.
The building will be the first new construction on campus in 15 years. Its estimated cost is $45 million, with $10 million raised to date in donations from trustees and alumni, Ms. Trimel said. The college may borrow to cover some of the remaining cost, but college officials said they were still hoping for more gifts.
The college is well placed financially to borrow, Ms. Trimel said. It lived frugally in the 1990's and recently received a positive review from Moody's, the financial rating agency. It had a record fund-raising year, raising $25 million.
The college chose Weiss/Manfredi, a New York architecture firm known for its design of the Women's Memorial and Education Center at Arlington National Cemetery. The design features an open space and an indoor garden on many levels. Part of the building's exterior will be transparent, allowing views of the interior from Broadway. The rest will be built of a material that resembles the brick of the campus's older buildings.
Barnard's president, Judith Shapiro, said the see-through center would brighten the edge of the campus, which runs along Broadway.
The 1960's building that now stands "gave the college a look of a maximum-security prison, really heavy and lurking," Dr. Shapiro said during a telephone interview on Friday. "The idea is to combine some real transparence to the outside with a lot of enclosed and intimate space."
The new student center will house a library, a cafe, seminar rooms and common space. It will include a 900-seat auditorium. Currently, the only large gathering place on campus is the gymnasium. Students will be able to send e-mail from computers in the building, and the roof will also have seating space.
"You'll see a lot of action and a lot of things going on," Ms. Trimel said. "It's considerably bigger than what is there now."
But despite its size, the building will not "be a tower," Dr. Shapiro said. "It won't feel like Wall Street. It will be the living center for what life is all about in a liberal arts college."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/images/newnews/nexus.jpg
http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/images/newnews/nexus2.jpg
http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/newnews/news100203b.html