Bettman Hall

Department of Art History and Archaeology

This 74-seat auditorium design provides state of the art multi-media capabilities to the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and serves as the space for public lectures and important departmental events.

The primary goal was to provide an intimate and flexible teaching environment that would perform equally well for faculty members regardless of their preferences for digital or analog teaching technologies.

 

The site is on the sixth floor of Schermerhorn Hall with windows to Amsterdam Avenue.  The renovation included a sloped floor and new seating while maintaining universal access, reshaping the ceiling and incorporating new lighting and ductwork, addressing sound and light from the existing windows by replacing the glass, and new finishes, furniture, and custom designed podium.  Finishes include the use of porous expanded polypropelene bead foam panels for acoustic control and a woven vinyl floor covering.

Location

New York, NY

Client

Columbia University

Year

2004

Size

1,500 sqft

MFA Design Team

Scott Marble, Karen Fairbanks, Jake Nishimura, Stacey Jacovini

Contractor

Arup

Contractor

Deborah Bradley Construction Services

Photography

Gregory Goode Photography

Campus Extension

With over 30 degree programs, FIT is a comprehensive design, business and liberal arts school surrounded by one of the most vibrant metropolitan centers in the world.

The new extension to FIT’s campus has the unique role of both reorienting the campus with a stronger connection to the city and revealing the diverse curriculum of the school.  Our proposal focuses on making the new building a productive interface between the school and the various constituents it serves.  A glass façade on the street wraps into the interior and unites the extension with the existing classrooms and studios, establishing a series of visual and aural connections between the teaching and learning spaces.

 

Today FIT’s programs reflect the increasing specialization and complexity of the design industry. With specialization, however, comes a need for interdisciplinary work that combines ideas from various fields to generate innovative new forms of design and production. New spatial organizations can facilitate this move towards collaborative working processes. Our proposal promotes new learning paradigms that foreground integrated, non-hierarchical forms of organization and rethink established boundaries of knowledge.

Location

New York, NY

Client

Fashion Institute of Technology

Project Type

Competition

Year

2003

MFA Design Team

Scott Marble, Karen Fairbanks, Todd Rouhe, Anne Timmerman, Jake Nishimura, Jolie Kerns, Stacey Jacovini, Kevin Cimini, Gavri Slasky

Consulting Engineer

Arup

Recognition

Competition Finalist

Career Services

School of International and Public Affairs

The Career Services offices are located on the main floor of SIPA at Columbia University, adjacent to an active public corridor and an exterior courtyard.

These offices serve as a crucial resource for students, and their location along a primary circulation spine required an innovative use of transparent and translucent materials to keep them visually connected and day lit while still affording the interior spaces some privacy. Acoustically rated windows with varied degrees of transparency were used along the length of the offices to provide light and controlled views to the outside. Interior offices have a related visual treatment, with views of the sky through multiple layers of interior glazing.

Location

New York, NY

Client

Columbia University

Year

2003

Size

1,800 sqft

MFA Design Team

Scott Marble, Karen Fairbanks, Jake Nishimura, Stacey Jacovini

Metal Fabrication

Product & Design

General Contractor

Ideal Interiors

Photography

Gregory Goode Photography

The POD Development System

iFAB Research and Development

The concept of the POD development System is to construct mid-rise multi-family rentals and condominiums, hotels, and dormitories in New York City and other urban areas using pre-engineered volumetric building units.

The PODs are manufactured and fitted out in an off-site factory and then delivered to site and assembled to create a self-supporting building structure.  The Core Design Team is responsible for developing the design and manufacturing strategy for the prototypical system. Factory, computer controlled production will be utilized to the maximum extent to reduce costs, improve quality and minimize time from conception to reality.  Moving beyond normative means of mass production, the goal is to develop a prototypical responsive system that can produce a variable product.  The system will evolve and develop to become inclusive of many aspects of housing including furnishings, appliances and services moving toward “high performance living.”

Location

New York, NY

Project Type

Research, Prototype

Year

2002

MFA Design Team

Scott Marble, Karen Fairbanks, Jake Nishimura

Client

GlennRich Holdings, LLC  (Glenn McDermott, Douglas Rich)

13th Street Loft

The client for this residence is an artist, commercial art director and avid collector of American folk art. The design goal was to incorporate the extensive folk art collection into a living / working loft – a kind of archive that would also serve as a working artist studio and living space.

Folk art was often produced in small communities around the country reflecting the social and cultural values of the local context unaffected by broader artistic movements. The art objects were often functional and part of everyday life with no pretensions of existing beyond their immediate purpose. The design intention of this residence was to create an environment that would reposition the art not as precious objects in a rarefied museum-like setting but more synthetically in context with the architecture. Various types of shelves were integrated into walls, pockets were built into walls, and openings were formed into cabinets all to create informal settings to store the art on display. Finishes were applied to basic materials (blackened steel, dyed wood, cast in place concrete) that would accentuate their natural properties – these materials would then serve to complement the art and set up episodic scenes to both view the art and choreograph movement through the space.

Location

New York, NY

Client

Private Client

Year

2002

Size

2,000 sqft

MFA Design Team

Scott Marble, Karen Fairbanks, Lars Fischer, Todd Rouhe, Jake Nishimura, Eric Brotherton, Benjamin Hummitsch

Structural Engineer

Norfast Consulting

Millwork

Bjork Carle Woodworking

General Contractor

Vangard Construction

Steel Fabricator

Product & Design

Photography

Gregory Goode Photography