“Breaking down spatial hierarchies” That was the motto behind the design of Henry R. Kravis Hall. Step right up to Columbia Business School’s newest landmark. Henry R. Kravis Hall embodies a commitment to community integration. Its scintillating facade reveals the bustling life within.
Henry R. Kravis Hall is one of two buildings that make up the new home of Columbia Business School. Facing it is the eight-story David Geffen Hall. Both were designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and FXCollaborative. They stand across from a one-acre park designed by James Corner Field Operations. Together, the pair comprises 492000 square feet.
Columbia Business School wanted to buck the tradition of separating faculty offices from student spaces. Inspired by public access to the ground floor, the design integrates all the school’s populations into one project.
Henry R. Kravis Hall is organized into alternating floors. These floors are designated for learning and faculty use. Arup consulted on the project’s structural engineering, envelope, and facade. They devised a skip-truss system to support this configuration. The overall building structure comprises ASTM A992 Grade 50 beams. These beams are fastened to steel columns on composite floors. Webs are placed throughout the grillage for additional bracing. The webs increase in frequency on faculty floors. This supports the classrooms and other wide-open spaces on student floors.
Modular, highly partitioned faculty offices are nested within the more robust structure. Columns are typically W34 sections. Beams range from W12s to W30s. W10s, W12s, and W14s make up the webs. The system ties into the steel of an underground structure that had been commissioned separately.
Two visually distinctive staircases pierce the building. Landings are surrounded by multipurpose spaces. This transforms conventional circulation into a vertical quadrangle. The routes along Henry R. Kravis Hall’s west and east elevations are for faculty and student movement. Landings that radiate from the student stair are commodious.
Both the alternating floors and unifying stairs are legible to passersby. Faculty floors are wrapped in a curtain wall. Vision glass includes a white ceramic frit on the exterior. This lends the surface a milky quality. It also modulates incoming daylight for the perimeter faculty offices. Student floors are finished in transparent glass planes. These are inset from the floor plate’s edge. The faculty stair is expressed as a fritted-glass plane. It zigzags among the horizontal wedges. Clear inset glass wends up the east elevation to reveal the student stair. The building is honest about what’s going on inside.
The facade steps in and out alongside the alternating floors. This confirmed the need for Arup’s skip-truss structure. Columns couldn’t be placed directly at the perimeter because of the layered composition. The skip system is perpendicular to the face. This accommodates long cantilever conditions of approximately 12 feet. Arup also conceived a ladder-truss system to support areas of glass that span multiple stories. In these places, two parallel ASTM A500 rectangular HSS are set in from the facade. The tubes link via horizontal elements.
The project team engaged W&W Glass in design-assist to create Henry R. Kravis Hall’s communicative skin. Design assist helps with constructability and installability. Because this building has unique setbacks and deep soffits, W&W was in control of how its steel connected to the structure.
W&W worked with Arup to introduce kicker angles and other stiffening techniques. This allowed Henry R. Kravis Hall’s structure to support the company’s preferred configurations and connections. W&W determined to execute the faculty facades as unitized curtain walls. The transparent glass of student floors are stick-built window walls. These have their own structural steel support system at the head and concrete curbs at the sill. Every floor has its own starter track because of the way every other floor steps back. Storefront glass wraps the ground floor. All standard systems absorb thermal, seismic, and differential movements of approximately 1 inch.
The stick-built walls are hanging systems. The steel head dead-loads the panels. W&W also considered large live load and drift movements. The three east-facing walls abutting the student stair span two or three stories. The company responded by adding aluminum-clad, ASTM A500 50 KSI rectangular HSS mullions to the glass. These were set into the starter tracks with base anchors. The mullions were set in section and spliced in the field.
At Columbia Business School, you know you’re in New York. The building activity and the urban context are visible to one another. It is a system that can adapt to all these bespoke situations.