Review - Incision Point

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s newest Manhattan project for a medical school upends the typology’s ingrained gloominess.

- Samuel Medina

The Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at the Columbia University Medical Center opened to students in mid-August, but they were preceded by an ominous bunch. “Actually, the first group of people to inhabit the building were stiffs,” hammed an affable Elizabeth Diller, primary principal of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), on a recent tour. Intended to endear, the quip highlights the strangeness of a scenario in which surgical cadavers, simulation dummies, and swarms of medical pupils coexist, rather happily it turns out, in a single building.

Architectural economy typically renders this melange gloomily, as the layout of nearly any medical school (or hospital) makes clear. Classrooms often have the charm of bunkers, natural light is a well guarded luxury, and grim hallways seem all but typological prerequisites. This state of affairs, like so many others, goes by the ignoble name of “efficiency.”

Tucked away in New York’s Washington Heights, Columbia’s new 14-story building doesn’t make scrupulous claims to efficiency, nor is its mien particularly emblematic of any floor-area-ratio quantum. The building does a canny job of managing an elaborate program. The architects met the challenge of an incredibly compact footprint—just 12,500 square feet at the base—with great invention, packing in a suite of active-learning classrooms, mock examination and operating rooms, an anatomy lab, a special-events space, lounges, and even a 275-person auditorium. (The constriction of the site had one felicitous consequence: Corridors are shrunk to the shortest possible length.)