New York City colleges and universities don't have traditional campuses because of the physical limitations of the city. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) found an interesting way around that in their recent project for The New School, creating a "campus within a building" that combines student housing, classrooms, labs, and a library.
The Greenwich Village "University Center" is located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street and has 16 floors, the upper nine of which are designated as student housing. There is 800-seat auditorium, numerous social areas, three dining areas, bike storage rooms and showers, a gym, art studios, a laundry room, and various other amenities and resources that one would expect to find on a college campus.
The 375,000 square feet of space added by the building eliminates the need for the school to have buildings all over the city. SOM design partner Roger Duffy told Dezeen that structure "transforms the traditional university environment...Rather than compartmentalising living and learning spaces, we strategically stacked these functions to create a vertical campus that supports the kind of interdisciplinary learning that has defined The New School since its founding."
Check out this project video below and follow the link to Dezeen for a more in-depth description of the building.
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[via Dezeen]
