Columbia University Northwest Corner Building Facade

Columbia University 

Northwest Corner 

Building Facade 

A glass and aluminum 

curtain wall system 

creates a fitting 

expression of structure 

on a 21st-century 

laboratory building. 

FAMED SPANISH ARCHITECT 

José Rafael Moneo is known for 

his elegantly conservative stoneclad 

institutional buildings. So his 

design for Columbia University’s 

Northwest Corner Building—an 

interdisciplinary sciences facility 

containing a library, faculty offices, 

student breakout space, and 

70,000 square feet of state-ofthe-art 

laboratories—may come 

as a surprise to some. Nestled 

among the beaux-arts grandeur 

of the McKim, Meade, and White 

campus, between Chandler 

and Pupin halls to be exact, the 

14-story, 188,000-gross-squarefoot 

structure is clad entirely in 

a unitized curtain wall system 

of glass and louvered aluminum 

panels. “Moneo’s design expresses 

that it’s a modern building, 

capable of looking to the future, 

an appropriate place for the sciences 

of the 21st century,” says 

Joseph Mannino, Associate Vice 

President of Columbia University 

Facilities. 

Moneo’s cladding concept 

is integrally linked to the building’s 

steel structural system. The 

entire elevation of the structure 

is designed as one giant truss 

with both internal and external 

bracing elements. The perimeter 

diagonals occupy select bays in 

a rational load pattern that the architect 

developed with structural 

engineering firm Arup. Moneo 

then expressed the diagonals on 

the exterior with opaque diagonally 

louvered aluminum panels. 

The panels, and diagonals themselves, 

were applied somewhat 

randomly and in painterly fashion. 

They alternate with panels of 

pure glazing, and panels with 

vision strips sandwiched between 

horizontal aluminum louvers, in 

a composition that speaks both 

to the artist and the structural 

engineer. 

The placement of these cladding 

elements also relates to 

the building’s program, which is 

divided in plan between east and 

west. The east, or campus-facing 

elevation houses faculty offices 

22 Metals in Construction Fall 2010 23

Left The facade expresses the building’s 

truss diagonals. 

Below left Four 18-foot-8-inch-high by 

5-foot-wide panels make up each bay of 

the double-height lab floors. 

Previous spread A glass-enclosed 

lounge looks north to upper Manhattan. 

Right The east elevation is clad with 

glass, exposing activity in offices and 

student spaces to the campus. 

and student breakout spaces, 

whereas the west face, which 

looks out on Broadway, houses 

the laboratory functions. While the 

labs boast generous 18-foot floorto-floor 

heights, the offices are 

subdivided in mezzanines, two 

per lab floor, creating an interesting 

tension between the two sides 

of the building. Moneo clad the 

east face entirely in glass, with the 

exception of its connection with 

Pupin Hall, where the louvered 

aluminum panels are used. This 

arrangement puts the indoor 

activity on view to the campus, an 

effect that the architect likens to a 

beehive. The lab side of the building, 

where more concentration 

is called on from the occupants, 

features the majority of the diagonally 

louvered opaque panels and 

the horizontally louvered vision 

strip panels. Again there is an 

exception, at the upper left hand 

corner of the elevation, where the 

all- glass system takes over. 

Executive architect Davis 

Brody Bond Aedas and facade 

consultant R.A. Heintges 

Associates honed this cladding 

concept into a unitized curtain 

wall system. In the unitized 

system, four 18-foot-8-inch-highby-5-foot-wide 

panels make up 

a single bay of the double-height 

lab floors. On the office floors, 

the all glass modules are of the 

same dimensions, though they 

are made up of two glass lites 

placed one atop the other, so they 

read as half as high. The 1-inchthick 

insulated glass units are a 

standard product, VE12M from 

Viracon. In the metal system they 

have ¼-inch outer and inner lites, 

though in the all-glazed condition 

they come with a 3/8-inch outer 

lite, and a ¼-inch inner lite. The 

extra thickness on the outer lite 

helps to prevent wave distortion 

and pillowing. The IGUs also feature 

thermally broken, warm-edge 

spacers—stainless steel spacers 

between the glass lites that offer 

higher thermal performance than 

Left: Adam Friedberg; top: Turner Construction; previous spread: Adam Friedberg 

Adam Friedberg 

the typical aluminum spacers. 

The system was fabricated in 

a collaborative effort between curtain 

wall contractor W&W Glass 

Systems, Inc., Canadian firm Sota 

Glazing Inc., and Kansas Citybased 

metal experts A. Zahner 

Company. Zahner provided the 

aluminum panels and louvers, 

which snap into the Sota-built the 

curtain wall system. W&W erected 

the completed system on site. 

“It’s very hard to get decent color 

control with anodized aluminum,” 

explains Heintges. “You can’t 

just start mixing up batches as 

any slight variation in the alloying 

constituents will cause a different 

color. We had to keep a tight 

control on the source of aluminum 

and keep in close contact with 

Zahner and Sota. 

The cladding system includes 

more than 1,000 panels and 

construction manager Turner was 

pressed to keep the site orderly 

and moving smoothly. Because 

of the building’s configuration 

there was not a lot of room to 

store panels onsite before they 

were put in place. Turner had to 

carefully coordinate trucking and 

installation in an intricate threeday 

cycle with two rigs on the 

roof chasing each other around 

and around the building while 

W&W’s ornamental ironworkers 

clipped the system into place. All 

in all, it took six months to erect 

the facade, no shabby figure. 

Maninno is excited. “We’re ready 

to occupy this building in the fall,” 

he says, “and cap off three and a 

half years of construction.” ! 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NORTHWEST CORNER BUILDING FACADE 

Location: Broadway and West 120th Street, New York, NY 

Owner: Columbia University, New York, NY 

Design Architect: Rafael Moneo Valles Arquitecto, 

Moneo Brock Studio, Madrid, Spain 

Architect of Record: Davis Brody Bond Aedas, New York, NY 

Structural Engineer: Ove Arup & Partners Consulting Engineers, PC, New York, NY 

Mechanical Engineer: Ove Arup & Partners Consulting Engineers, PC, New York, NY 

Construction Manager: Turner Construction Company, New York, NY 

Curtain Wall Consultant: R.A. Heintges & Associates, New York, NY 

Structural Steel Erector: DCM Erectors, Inc., New York, NY 

Miscellaneous Iron Fabricator and Erector: Post Road Iron Works, Inc., Greenwich, CT 

Ornamental Metal Fabricator and Erector: Empire City Iron Works, Long Island City, NY 

Curtain Wall Fabricator: Sota Glazing Inc., Brampton, ON 

Curtain Wall Erector: W&W Glass, LLC, Nanuet, NY 

Metal Deck Erector: Solera / DCM, New York, NY 

24 Metals in Construction Fall 2010 Columbia University Northwest Corner Building Facade 

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Columbia University Northwest Corner Building Facade

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