Grounds

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

College Hall moves closer to Low Library, September 19, 1905. Photograph. From Columbia University Archives, Historical Photograph Collection, scan 2126.

Grounds

Columbia arrived in Upper Manhattan during a period of intense investment in the city’s infrastructure. The university borrowed a steady stream of inventions and adaptations from public works to create a sophisticated campus. It grafted itself onto the rocky “plinth,” plugging into the asylum’s existing tunnels and cloaking the latest service networks (electric lighting, indoor plumbing) behind serene neoclassical façades. It was a process marked by continuous selection, curation, survivals, and continuances.

Buell Hall is the only Bloomingdale building to survive almost intact on Columbia’s campus. No archival document exists where trustees or architects mandated its preservation; in fact, all master plans show the building gone. There is plentiful evidence for its continued salvage, however. Even as the asylum’s buildings were razed one by one; even as the main building’s bricks were auctioned off, Buell Hall survived.

First, the villa was strategically useful. When the Trustees hired Charles McKim to design a master plan, the architect devised a modular scheme so construction could be sequenced: work on new buildings could begin immediately while asylum buildings remained, some of them occupied temporarily by classes and other activities. This phasing helped the new campus open to students as early as 1895.

Second, Buell Hall survived in part because it could accommodate the less monumental functions needed for constructing – and later, managing – the vast campus of a modern mass university. Even when this small building encroached on the master plan, it could be moved. Compared to the university’s massive new stone-and-steel halls, the former villa was light and transportable. As shown in this photograph, it was lifted off its foundations and slid along soaped wooden planks, losing its porches to become a cubic volume.

Lastly, with its image of genteel domesticity, Buell Hall undoubtedly began to seem picturesque and thus historically valuable as the years went on, its small scale softening the grand symmetry of the Beaux-Arts campus, and its eclectic historicism sitting well with the university chapel nearby.

Steam tunnels under Columbia University, undated

Steam tunnels under Columbia University, undated, source unknown

The Bloomingdale Insane Asylum maintained a pastoral character on its grounds while building an extensive infrastructure beneath. A network of tunnels came to crisscross the site during the 19th Century, delivering coal to each building’s furnace and allowing staff to move – sometimes with patients – out of sight.

When Columbia University began laying the foundations for its master plan, it kept the tunnels that snaked below and expanded them to facilitate steam heating and electric power. They continue to elicit lore, but can we still call them tunnels, given there is so little natural “ground” for them to burrow into? More accurately, they are part of the multi-story plinth of technical services that sustains the university.

Bloomingdale tree survey, 1893

Frederick Law Olmsted, “Columbia University, Northerly Portion of Grounds” (1893), Library of Congress

Before building, Columbia’s Trustees hired the landscape architecture office of Frederick Law Olmsted to conduct a census of all trees and shrubs growing on the property. Olmsted’s son and namesake made a delicate plan drawing depicting a tree-covered north end. A wide range of species and sizes are peppered among the asylum’s paths, walls, and coal chutes.

The survey marked some trees as “dead” or “nearly dead” and many would be removed, but Olmsted Jr. asked that the mature and healthy trees remain. Some were survivors from the Elgin Botanic Garden collection that Columbia itself had donated to the asylum 73 years before. Maintained and sometimes surgically reinserted to suit the growing campus’s design, the plants were supposed to augment the university’s built form, much as the uneven topography delineated in this drawing would soon be tamed and framed by McKim’s flat lawns and stepped courts.