The Forum, A New Meeting and Discussion Facility on the Manhattanville Campus, Now Open

Completing the first group of Renzo Piano-designed buildings, The Forum provides a gateway to an urban campus designed for both academic and civic engagement.

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger today joined Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, founder and principal of Renzo Piano Building Workshop, to inaugurate The Forum: a new 56,000-square-foot, three-story facility that completes the first ensemble of new buildings on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus in West Harlem. The Forum adds long-needed space at Columbia for academic conferences, meetings and public discussion to the new campus’s already completed buildings dedicated to arts presentation and neuroscience research. The facility will serve the entire University community, while providing a welcoming, transparent gateway to the 17-acre campus for students, faculty, guest scholars and members of the general public.

Conceived as a new kind of open, urban campus to support Columbia’s academic mission while also providing a shared resource for the local community, the Manhattanville campus is publicly accessible throughout at street level, incorporating spaces for public engagement in all its buildings, as well as publicly accessible open spaces. Facilities already in use include free public programming such as a public neuroscience Education Lab for local students and adults of all ages, a community Wellness Center with screening and outreach programs designed and staffed by Columbia physicians, and the new home of Columbia’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery with a range of exhibits built around local artists and themes.

Triangular in plan to match its distinctive site at West 125th Street and Broadway, The Forum is visually transparent at street level like its RPBW-designed neighbors, the Lenfest Center for the Arts and the Jerome L. Greene Science Center. Anyone may pass freely from the sidewalk into a Forum café with Wi-Fi, an information center, and a ground-floor space where Columbia’s schools and divisions will offer programming. After the inaugural year, the program space will also be available by reservation for community groups. On the upper floors, The Forum houses a 437-seat auditorium, a variety of meeting rooms, and offices that will initially be used by two related University initiatives to address a range of public challenges facing our society: Columbia World Projects and the Obama Foundation Scholars.

“Sixteen years in the conceiving and making, the new campus in Manhattanville provides Columbia with the opportunity to do research and teach better in the present and also to have the freedom to imagine its future,” said Bollinger. “The Forum completes the spectacular triad of the first buildings on this new kind of urban campus, which reflects not only modern design, but modern values about how we can mutually benefit our local communities – defined by a visual openness and civic function that welcomes everyone in to participate in what only a truly great university can do.”

“In designing the master plan for the campus and its first three buildings, we wanted to help Columbia as a global university in the city and for the city,” said Piano. “So New York’s streets and sidewalks are woven into the fabric of the campus. This is not like the campus of earlier centuries. All the buildings are transparent, open to the public, and have amenities for the local community at street level, including plazas and green spaces for everyone to share. The architecture draws on the neighborhood’s industrial vocabulary, as you see for example with the exposed structural elements inside The Forum. We think of these buildings as machines – new kinds of machines for doing scientific research, for presenting the arts, and now, with The Forum, for bringing people together and communicating.”

Activities at The Forum

During the months after the official opening, The Forum will gradually become the site for a variety of academic and public programs from across the Columbia community. Among the first programs to be hosted at The Forum are:

• a day-long, international conference co-organized by the University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference and Women Creating Change, What We CAN Do When There’s Nothing To Be Done: Strategies for Change, on September 28, 2018
• Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, a symposium organized in conjunction with the trailblazing exhibition that will open at the Wallach Art Gallery in the nearby Lenfest Center for the Arts, on November 8, 2018

The Forum’s 4,200-square-foot ground-floor café will offer a casual place for snacks and light meals, lingering for conversation over coffee, reading a book or connecting to Wi-Fi. For the more formal programs organized at The Forum, the café will also serve as a catering facility.

Offices on the upper floors of The Forum are initially being used by two University-wide Columbia programs:

• Columbia World Projects, established in 2017, 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 and will help guide the way to solutions to intractable problems, while additionally enriching research and scholarship.
• The Obama Foundation Scholars at Columbia, part of Columbia World Projects, now welcoming its inaugural class of 12 rising change-makers from Asia, Africa, South America, South Asia and Europe for a year-long academic and civic leadership program designed to strengthen the expertise and knowledge of individuals with a demonstrated ability to be transformative leaders in their communities, nations and the world. From their base in The Forum, Columbia’s Obama Foundation Scholars will participate in immersive learning across the University and New York City, along with networking, mentorship, service and leadership development activities led by the Obama Foundation.

In the future, other university programs and initiatives may be located in in The Forum’s office spaces.

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