Occupants

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

Photo of McKim, Mead & White architectural office at 61st St. in Everett Waid, “The Business Side of an Architect’s Office,” The Brickbuilder 22 no. 12 (December 1913)

Occupants

It may seem that Buell Hall has survived not by plan but by default. Yet, the building has consistently offered a useful post from which to overlook or manage the campus, first during its construction and later, for its operation. Its survival encourages us to pay attention to small stories of unintended but powerful uses of highly planned environments.

One of Buell Hall’s first university occupants was the campus’s architect himself, Charles McKim, who could be found sleeping in his makeshift construction site office. Formerly called the Macy Villa, he dubbed it “McKim Villa.” The architect claimed to have camped here for months, supported by a cook and several members of his architectural staff. The table pictured here held drawings of the university’s future campus as they received inky corrections in the firm’s office on 61st Street. With its inlaid pearl button (wired to the secretary next door) and four chairs, it was a standard of McKim, Mead & White’s studios. Today, one of these tables still sits on the building’s third floor, inside the Buell Center. After the architect vacated this small outlier building, it served as the university president’s office and numerous other purposes: as Alumni House, the men’s crew team clubhouse, the college dean’s office, an army recruitment center, the General Studies program office, and now, as a home for architectural research and the Maison Française.

A campus is more than an assemblage of buildings and lawns. The story of this one architectural survival invites us to look beyond the seeming uniformity of contemporary universities, which appear permanent in their smooth architecture, manicured grounds, and guarded entrances. Their occupants – students, faculty, staff, and visitors – may seem transitory by contrast, especially on urban campuses like Columbia’s, where movement is all around.

This exhibition’s research invites us to look for other historical survivances, including those that were not architecturally manifested, and those that persist in memory despite their eviction. Even temporary, fleeting uses of the campus as a platform to the wider world have set the course for generations seeking to redefine the role of knowledge in property and public life.

Lenape village as imagined from written records, 1858

George Hayward, “An Indian Village of the Manhattans, prior to the occupation by the Dutch” in Valentine’s Manual (1858), NYC Municipal Library

This area’s first architecture was made of bent wood and clad in bark; built up seasonally and allowed to biodegrade by Lenape bands and other tribal delegations. This print represents longhouses with several doors and chimney holes, suggesting collectivity. European settler encampments were also made of wood – and likely sod, bark, and other scavenged materials. They were, architecturally, no more permanent except in their intentions: to anchor future waves of colonization.

Shanties in Harlem, 1874

Ralph A. Blakelock, Shanties in Harlem (1874), Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum

From the first years of settlement, land promised abundance but poverty was the city’s rule, not its exception. While New York formalized itself in brick and stone, self-built homes abounded on farms and at the city’s edges. “Shanties” were often clustered on higher, rockier terrain not suitable for farming. Romantically depicted here, they were displaced and evacuated as Columbia solidified its foothold and expanded its holdings in the 20th Century.

Bloomingdale Asylum patient record, 1895

Bloomingdale Asylum patient record (1895), The New York Bloomingdale Insane Asylum Records 8, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Asylum patients were not always willing residents. In the 1800s, their rising numbers reflected both growing acceptance of psychiatric care and a research enterprise in need of patient data. In 1844, affluent psychiatrist Pliny Earle took charge of the Bloomingdale; he believed that mental illnesses were hereditary and began tracing all patients’ family histories. The result was a comprehensive “medical register,” a single continuous record of illness that supplanted older practices wherein admissions and treatment had been separate tasks.

Morningside Park Protest, 1968

Protesters crossing construction fence in Morningside Park (1968), Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, image courtesy Steve Ditlea

The park remained a barrier between the university and Harlem. This rift widened when Columbia proposed to embed a new gym into the park’s cliffs in 1959, with entrances segregating students from Harlem residents: one door high above, one along the rocky escarpment below. The architectural proposal temporarily aligned tenants, students, anti-war and civil rights activists in opposition and, in 1968, mobilized them in an epoch-defining occupation, setting a global precedent for student action and solidarity.