Game Changer: Columbia University's quirky but tough field house bridges the divide between its gritty surroundings and the athletic playing fields beyond.
There are few American campuses more urban than Columbia University's; even its athletic fields are in Manhattan, grouped together in the cramped Baker Athletics Complex at the island's northern tip. For years, the rinky-dink facility 'was not a welcoming place,' says William V. Campbell, a former Columbia football captain and head coach who became an entrepreneur and Columbia trustee. The complex was a morale buster for both its users'the coaches and varsity athletes who had to commute back and forth to the main campus five miles south'and the surrounding community, which, at Broadway and 218th Street, overlooked a cinder-block equipment shed.
Now that corner is home to something much livelier: a 48,000-square-foot building named for Campbell and designed by Steven Holl Architects for athletes and their coaches. Holl, who has taught architecture at Columbia since 1981 but never previously built for the university, and his partner, Chris McVoy, a Columbia graduate, designed the $30 million building as a series of gangly forms that rise from the sloping site like a scissor lift.
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