Architecture as Pedagogy
Tags: Barnard College, Architecture, Higher Ed, Design, New York

The 128,000-square-foot building, with a base of five floors and a tower of 11 floors that structurally aligns with the adjacent brutalist Altschul Hall, is designed to encourage interaction between students and faculty in one dynamic complex. Organized as a fully interdisciplinary community, the complex transitions from active, bustling spaces to quiet, reflective spaces as one moves their way to the top. Inside the library, a signature stairwell leads users up from a ground floor space with a cafe, suite of multimedia Centers, and a wide variety of study areas to quieter, more individual spaces surrounded by books. The Milstein Center alleviates the campus’ office space shortage, becoming the new multidisciplinary home to departments affiliated with social sciences including economics, urban studies, political science and history. It also contains expanded conference facilities and features the Vagelos Computational Sciences Center, the Athena Center for Leadership Studies, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. The Milstein Center is home to several academic centers that help students explore new ways of learning through hands-on research, collaborations, and conversations including the Empirical Reasoning Center, Design Center, Digital Humanities Center, Sloate Media Center, and the Movement Lab. These innovative centers provide a range of resources that reflect the connections and intersections that lie at the core of Barnard’s educational philosophy. “The new building permits students to find a space that invites them to study and learn, that engages them with all kinds of technology, and enables that staff of the library to move forward and help support and innovate our curriculum,” says Provost Linda Bell.

Outdoor spaces play a critical role in the Milstein Center’s vibrancy, with terraces on the second, third, and fourth floors. As part of the project, Lehman Lawn was slightly elevated in order create a more accessible and connected campus entrance. Photo © Magda Biernat

Outdoor spaces play a critical role in the center’s vibrancy as well, with terraces on the second, third, and fourth floors that make for exceptional areas for studying or socializing. SOM also slightly raised the elevation of the Lehman Lawn, the open space between Barnard’s wrought iron fencing and The Milstein Center, in order to create a more accessible entry to the heart of the campus and connected campus experience. “The Milstein Center is more than a wonderful new building. It is a game changer for Barnard…and it will help Barnard become even more extraordinary,” says the college’s president Sian Beilock.

Inside and out, top to bottom, the building is a fresh and diversified source of vitality for a comprehensive, cutting-edge education nestled within an urban campus. How did it all come to be? The team answers below:

What made Barnard a unique client?

Carrie Moore: There were so many women represented on the client side, starting at the interview. For me, that was profound because I could look out to the other end of the table and see people who looked like me and that was not the case on any prior projects I had worked on. Of course Barnard is a women’s school, but I do think team diversity is where things are shifting within higher ed in general. That dynamic was a key component to the project’s success.

Meredith Bostwick-Lorenzo Eiroa: Working on a site like The Milstein Center is quite special because the intervention that was required is right at the heart of the campus that is essentially the size of one large Manhattan block. Ask any student and they will tell you that Barnard is a special campus and community in the middle of the big city.

Meredith Bostwick-Lorenzo Eiroa meets with Barnard students on the campus lawn. Photo © Asiya Khaki

If you’re standing on the main lawn you can see every corner of the full campus, so site visits became the perfect opportunity to casually take in feedback from students and faculty we’d run into outside of formal meetings. The physical place makes a strong campus and community like none I’ve ever seen working with higher education clients. Those experiences sparked so many ideas and spearheaded the need to create something special that is uniquely of this place — a new kind of library.

What did Barnard outline as their key needs?

Colin Koop: They essentially had a building dedicated to book storage and faculty offices but what they wanted was a building that was more interdisciplinary — a crossroads with a set of space types which would appeal to a broad demographic of teachers and students. They had a desire for engaged pedagogy, a movement lab, and study spaces. The campus as a whole did not have enough seats for students to study, collaborate, or socialize, so huge swaths of students were heading to Columbia to find seats. This wasn’t just about the pedagogy of the library, but also the quantity of area that students could use for anything.

The Movement Lab is one of the center’s several academic centers helping students explore new ways of learning. Photo © Magda Biernat

How much of a role did students have in the design process?

Meredith: When we began thinking about what our first meetings might be like, I made a call to Debora Spar, the college president at the time, who was the champion for this project from the beginning. I asked, ‘What’s the right way to begin to engage with the Barnard community?’ and she said, ‘Start with the students… let’s listen.’ So together with Debora and Brightspot Strategy, we crafted a series of listening sessions on multiple themes that shape the student experience at Barnard: how they study, how they want to collaborate with their peers, what they’d like to see in a new kind of library, what we can learn from what works today, and what’s missing. Our initial interactions were a set of questions and intake sessions to learn from students, staff, faculty, and leadership. From those sessions, we were able to better understand how to best scaffold their learning and support different student experiences through the course of their studies.

What kind of surprises showed up along the way?

Meredith: We were dealing with a very constrained site with ever-increasing requirements and nuances. It was a fast-paced schedule, with a growing list of program needs to be met within a constrained budget. During the programming process, we learned that Barnard students can access several physical spaces at Columbia University, so the question then became ‘What do we already have at Columbia versus what do we need here?’ One of the greatest challenges was to reevaluate with library staff and faculty how to right-size the facility in the absence of a library Dean in the design phases: How many collections would it hold? What would be kept offsite? How would the special collections and archives grow? What instructional and media spaces would it serve? We also had to determine what other types of study and learning spaces would be critical for a 21st century library. The challenge was then to balance a variety of needs within a total space budget, while finding opportunities to create new Centers and flexible spaces that could host student-centered needs that had not yet been defined.

Carrie: After all of the consensus building and collaboration in the programming effort, we all eventually had to make a tough call around shrinking the size of the building to keep it within a shrinking budget. There was one program reconciliation meeting with faculty where by the end of it, everyone from Barnard’s side was in agreement on what they would sacrifice for the sake of a better project overall. We expected this conversation to be a struggle, but because there was so much involvement from the start, everyone was on the same page. We had that one session and then we were able to move forward with everyone getting what they were looking for, which was remarkable.