Northwest Sciences Building by Rafael Moneo: Circumstantial Evidence

Among the suite of images put together by Rafael Moneo’s office for purposes of a Powerpoint presentation about his Northwest Sciences Building at Columbia University are a rustic stone-and-brick Basque farmhouse with diagonal timber bracing and a drawing by Jasper Johns from the artist’s Crosshatching series. Beyond their sha diagonal iconography, these evocative images from utterly different worlds—along with a third, the facade of Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt project of 1953–54 for a long-span convention center—suggest the gamut of inspiration and aspiration that informs the architecture of Moneo’s new Columbia University building. The brief was a demanding one: to fit into the university’s century-old brick-and-mortar McKim Mead & White campus; to house twentieth-first century research in several theoretical and applied sciences; to span a large preexisting sports facility that occupies most of the ground and subterranean level (and had to remain open during construction); to bridge to two adjacent science buildings; and to complete the corner of the Morningside Heights campus on a sloping city block while making a mark on the neighborhood skyline and emblematically opening to a planned extension of the university half a dozen blocks northwest in Harlem. These heterogeneous givens demanded a complex, not to say complicated, solution. It is to Moneo’s great credit that he succeeded in finding an architectural image coherent and legible enough to subsume them all.