With the new Whitney Museum of American Art, Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) bestowed lavish gifts on Manhattan, including a series of terraces overlooking the High Line, going far beyond the museum’s core programmatic needs. The firm does something similar with its Jerome L. Greene Science Center and neighboring Lenfest Center for the Arts, the first completed buildings at Columbia University’s Manhattanville Campus, a 17-acre site in Harlem, northwest of Columbia’s main Morningside Heights location. Greene contains laboratory space for neurological research; Lenfest, a stack of exhibition and performance venues. But both also make generous contributions to the neighborhood. Those include Greene’s lobby, which is open to the public seven days a week until 10 p.m. Handsomely appointed and generously proportioned, it bisects the building, leading straight through from its east-facing main entrance to a new plaza on its western side. That plaza is shared with Lenfest, which also contains public spaces, including the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, relocated from a hard-to-find spot on Columbia’s main campus. (RPBW’s third Manhattanville building, a conference center called the University Forum, is already under construction immediately south of Greene, while its fourth, the Global Center, will rise west of Lenfest.) In providing the amenities that it promised the community when it announced the controversial expansion—its largest in more than 100 years—Columbia is off to a rip-roaring start.