Bedrock

Before you were here

A history of the campus’s land told from its oldest surviving building

A campus, contrary to all appearances, is not a singular, bounded place. This exhibition offers an architectural history of Columbia’s campus’s land, as told from Buell Hall, its oldest surviving building. Predating the university’s arrival, this “villa” was built as an experimental pavilion for an “insane asylum” 140 years ago, at a moment when diseases were newly thought to be genetic and mental health worthy of dedicated hospitals. Research into this small building’s history – why it was built, how it was relocated, what changes in the land accompanied its survival – has uncovered a trove of lessons about architecture, bedrock, plants, and property, revealing a dynamic that extends far beyond the building’s modest footprint and the institution’s neat perimeter.

This deep history of land-shaping events is exhibited in eight vitrines. First and foremost, they cast doubt on the clichéd notion that campuses are “master-planned” once and remain complete forever. The vitrines proceed in roughly chronological order, but also revisit patterns and themes, exploring the inventive and sometimes forceful ways land and architecture are leveraged to suit changing human uses.

The story begins with Bedrock and its shaping of life above ground. Before any building, there are Signals of settlement or movement; this vitrine recognizes the power of a hilltop to call attention, beginning with Morningside Heights’ long Indigenous land tenure and on to a succession of new uses and names. Once institutions make formal plans to build, they advertise their relationships to nature and the city through architectural Imaginaries.

Holdings is the first vitrine to feature Columbia’s discrete ownership of this land. The school expanded over three centuries – from a single land grant to an international property portfolio – by marching northward from Lower Manhattan to Upstate New York and beyond. Experiments reflects on the medical and topographical innovations that have inflected institutional missions and identities here. In Grounds, we observe the technologies invented to pack forms of academic life tightly together, despite stubborn physical obstacles. Finally, in Occupants, we visit the gatherings foiled or enabled by buildings, often temporary but affecting the mood long after they depart.

This exhibition was conceived and curated over three years by student, staff, and faculty researchers at the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, currently housed in Buell Hall.

Credits

Buell Center: Lucia Allais, Director; Elsa MH Mäki, Assistant Director; Michelle Huynh Chu, Program Manager

Exhibition concept, research, design: Lucia Allais, Ultan Byrne, Andrew Chee, Michelle Huynh Chu, Omar Ismail, Spenser Krut, Elsa MH Mäki, Amora McConnell, Jacob Moore, Clarisse Figueiredo de Queiroz, Yara Saqfalhait, Jordan Steingard, Paula Volpato, Xueyuan Wang, Catherine Weilein, Stephen Zimmerer

Section drawings: Omar Ismail and team

Digital landscape model: Sonia Sobrino Ralston

Special thanks: Aleksandr Bierig, Kaoukab Chebaro, Andrew Dolkart, Marguerite Holloway, Maura Lucking, Bill Menke, Joanna Rios, Don Schlosser, Kendra Sykes, Mika Tal, Jocelyn Wilk, Avery Library, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York Botanical Garden

Buell Center: Omar Ismail and team

Bedrock

1615. Until the mid-17th Century, the Lenape and neighboring Indigenous nations managed this land’s forests, marshes, tides, storm surges, and its plant and animal communities. By staying seasonally in small encampments, harvesting crops, hunting and fishing, and periodically setting fires to support growth, they maintained an ecology spanning the entire Atlantic Coast. By 1700, these nations had been driven out of their homelands, and while they have established tribal governments elsewhere, they continue to press for return.

1750. A farm stood on this site for much of the 18th Century. Buildings were mostly dedicated to plants and animals, with only a few for human habitation. Monoculture tilled and deepened the soil. Land was allotted, divided and inherited, and eventually sold to two brothers named DePeyster, who co-managed their parcels. Theirs was a gentleman’s farm, where land’s value comes not from sustaining its inhabitants but from producing sellable commodities, including the land itself by keeping it “productive” while anticipating a northward wave of urbanization.

1885. The first institution to consolidate this land into a single campus was the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, a rural outpost of the New York Hospital established in 1821. Its imposing brick building, with its H-shaped Kirkbride plan, signalled a new era of mental healthcare that prized both science and proximity to agricultural fields, where patients were required to labor as part of treatment. In the mid-19th Century, the asylum began experimenting with a more “domestic” scale of architecture to attract wealthier clients: “villas” surrounded by delicate porches and dedicated staff.

2025. In the 125 years that Columbia has inhabited these grounds, buildings have filled in almost every inch, yet verdant open space remains central to the institution’s identity. Thus, the ground has thickened into a complex infrastructural platform. Columbia’s lawns and plazas sit not atop bare earth, but a cavernous maze of bedrock, fresh water, plant and fungal life, all slowly moving around tunnels, boilers, parking garages, and laboratories.

Schist in motion, 2018

Jason King, “Ice Age: New York” photograph (2018); diagram by Buell Center: Xueyuan Wang with Michelle Huynh Chu

New York was once buried under a heavy ice shelf whose top loomed twice as high as the Empire State Building. 14,000 years ago, the melting ice carved a distinctive pattern into the bedrock as it withdrew. This geologic legacy shaped Columbia: in 1890, the Committee on Site argued “nature” had destined this place for a campus by lifting a “plinth” high above the city. Bedrock can still be found between buildings at Teachers College, as outcroppings in Morningside Park, and channeling a stream beneath Avery Hall.

Plantscape, ca. 1615

Sonia Sobrino Ralston, AR landscape model (2025)

This QR code links to a virtual meander across this ground and among the plants known to grow here 415 years ago. It was made by Sonia Sobrino Ralston, a designer who works with landscape and information systems. As formal archives of the land during its long Indigenous tenure are piecemeal, such a reconstructive model draws from oral histories, seed biology, and historical ecology.