Architecture

Ms. Braasch was the Project Architect for the Columbia University Division of Student Affairs while working at Stephen Yablon Architect.  For more information click here to visit the SYA website.

From SYA:

The advising center is a renovation of two floors of Alfred Lerner Hall that creates a space in which to guide and enrich students’ academic experience as well as their lives in New York.

Areas of public circulation are faced with metal panel walls perforated in a pattern based on the paving in Low Plaza, the iconic center of the University.  With a highly reflective surface behind the perforations, these walls reflect visitors’ images onto its pattern, symbolic of the Center’s mission to guide students through the University.  The same pattern is recalled more literally in the tile floor demarcating the public areas.  This pattern and the walls contemporary materials evoke the past, present, and the future of the University and its students in one gesture.

Warmth is created throughout by the use of light wood and colored furniture.  Despite the dense program located on a very limited floor plate, natural light and spaciousness pervades throughout as a result of open areas near windows, view corridors, borrowed light, etc.