Columbia University
Jerome L. Greene Science Center
New York, NY

458,000 sf • LEED® Gold certification • WITH RPBW

Davis Brody Bond has been working with Columbia University since 1990 on their historic campus, as well as on other sites owned by the University. Over the course of over 25 years, we have completed approximately 20 projects for Columbia comprising services from master planning and programming studies, to renovations and the design and construction of new facilities. For the past 11 years, we have been working on the development of Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus, a three phase, 17-acre urban academic environment that encompasses than 6.8M sf of space for teaching, research, civic, cultural, recreational, and commercial activity. Davis Brody Bond served as the Executive Architect / Architect of Record with Renzo Piano Design Workshop on the first group of buildings.

The Jerome L. Greene Science Center — the intellectual home for Columbia’s expanding research initiative in Mind, Brain and Behavior — is the first building completed as part of the new campus. The nine-story, 458,000 sf building is the largest that Columbia has ever built and the biggest academic science building in New York City. It brings together a constellation of global leaders in neuroscience, engineering, statistics, psychology, and other disciplines, with the common goal of exploring the causal relationships between gene function, brain wiring, and human behavior. This research will have profound implications for the treatment of brain illness — probing the root causes of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and motor neuron diseases, among others. 

The building is designed for the kind of social interaction and interdisciplinary thought that is essential for innovative ideas to thrive. The Center’s design employs a unique laboratory concept consisting of four neighborhoods articulated by two intersecting axes. On the research levels, the North-South axis is dedicated to circulation, while the East-West axis is an active area that includes meeting rooms and break spaces on each floor and a 120-seat lecture space at the top floor. These spaces make up a key feature of the research experience at the Center, encouraging collaboration among the scientists by interspersing circulation, connecting stairs, double-height spaces, and a variety of scales of meeting rooms and other interaction spaces within the research and support spaces.

(Photography by Albert Vecerka)