Glass Ramps/Glass Wall

Deviations from the Normative: Alfred Lerner Hall, Columbia University
Bernard Tschumi

Tschumi’s Alfred Lerner Hall is a turbulent mixture of the conventional and the innovative. Its opaque, masonry-clad wings respond to the traditional materials and massing of the Columbia University campus, while its transparently clad middle develops as a spectacular multitiered system of glass ramps. Designed in collaboration with a team of engineers, including Hugh Dutton, the glass ramps and the glass wall are intersupporting. Together they form a central hub of circulation, an event space that registers the dilation and contraction of structural and social flows. In the words of Jesse Reiser, Alfred Lerner Hall ‘signals a crucial turning point in Tschumi’s oeuvre. While a legacy of built and unbuilt works beginning with the Manhattan Transcripts prioritized the programmatic as an irreducible condition to architecture, Lerner Hall inverts this logic, foregrounding physicality instead.’
Glass Ramps/Glass Wall documents in full the making of this complex building, from early concept sketches to structural diagrams and final construction photos.