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Buell Dissertation Colloquium

The biennial Dissertation Colloquium brings together a select group of doctoral students from diverse institutional and disciplinary backgrounds working on dissertation topics related to the history, theory, and criticism of American architecture, urbanism, and landscape. 

Buell Conferences on the History of Architecture

The Buell Conference on the History of Architecture brings together scholars in architectural and urban history to discuss topics in architecture, urbanism, and modernity as broadly understood.

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Before you were here

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

 

Bedrock

Bedrock

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.

Signals

Signals

All modern building cultures are prefigured by messages, through which communities stake a claim to belonging. Manhattan is no different.

Imaginaries

Imaginaries

The first architecture designed to give this site a deliberate public image arrived in the early 19th Century.

Holdings

Holdings

Since its 1754 founding as King’s College, teaching its first classes in the vestry of Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, Columbia University has consistently moved its facilities northward.

Experiments

Experiments

The last 150 years of this site’s history have been marked by an experimental attitude derived from the natural and social sciences. Its built experiments – often channeled through New York’s elite social circles – have defined the scale of the campus’s architectural experience and the tenor of its landscape.

Grounds

grounds

Columbia arrived in Upper Manhattan during a period of intense investment in the city’s infrastructure.

Occupants

occupants

It may seem that Buell Hall has survived not by plan but by default.

 

Signals

James Darby, “A scene on oyster creek during the recent fire in the pine and cedar forests” in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 50 no. 1287 (29 May 1880)


Signals

All modern building cultures are prefigured by messages, through which communities stake a claim to belonging. Manhattan is no different. 

The first written record of the word “Manahatta” appears in the diary of Robert Juet, a crewman aboard a ship chartered by the East India Company to map what came to be known as the Hudson River. As they sailed through the harbor, Juet wrote the crew “saw a great Fire, but could not see the land.”1 The timing of this mention, in early September, suggests the glowing flame and billowing smoke Juet saw were products of Indigenous land management developed here over millennia. Like many Indigenous homelands, Lenapehoking was tended by fire. Seasonal controlled burns maintained succession landscapes abundant with food to sustain humans and their animal counterparts. 

The Lenni-Lenape and other Indigenous nations, including the Wappinger, Mohawk, and Wampanoag, convened in the area of Manhattan now called Astor Place (among others) to negotiate the region’s stewardship, visit, and celebrate. They passed seasonally through sites according to cycles that included hunting, fishing, shaping landscapes, and signalling these changes with flames on the horizon. They continued to steward the land freely until about a generation after the Dutch appeared in Lower Manhattan.

The Europeans who dispossessed the Lenape through attacks and enclosure also used their labor to signal their intent to settle. As the bottom of this engraving shows, they channeled streams into canals, dug wells to reach aquifers beneath forests and marshlands, and allotted and tilled the land. Colonists employed the concept of “improvement” to explain these works, justifying them through the promise of economic output. In fact, this new kind of agriculture narrowed the range by which land’s productivity could be evaluated. The soil’s increasing dedication to monoculture impoverished it, and required constant cultural reinforcement to maintain settler confidence in how land could be capitalized: how it would, eventually, pay them back for their hardscrabble existence in an unwelcoming place. 


Low Library under construction, 1897

low library

Low Library completed in front of a working farm (1897), Columbiana Collection, Columbia University Archives

Campus architect Charles McKim imagined that the groves, villas, and trails of the Bloomingdale medical campus would be wholly replaced by an architecture of tailored urban classicism. His master plan was full of copper-roofed academic buildings arranged around wide brick plazas. He also ensured that construction would start as early as possible. 

For a brief period in the early 1900s, Columbia’s flagship domed building overlapped on this site with a working farm. While they had been owned and manipulated for centuries, these fields now sent a new signal: they communicated the university’s belief in the liberal arts’ civilizing mission, where classicism could domesticate wild nature into a space for modern public life.