Steven Holl Architects Renovates NYU Building

The firm also designed furniture, light fixtures, coat hooks, and door handles.

Nicholas Tamarin -- Interior Design, 10/19/2007

Architecture firm Steven Holl Architects has completed a 30,000 square foot interior renovation of an 1890 building in New York--without changing its historic exterior. The building will now house New York University's Department of Philosophy.

Located at 3-5 Washington Place, the facility includes faculty and graduate student offices, seminar rooms, a periodicals library and lounge, and a ground floor 120-seat cork auditorium.

The highlight of the firm's renovation is a new porous stair that changes directions on each floor and vertically connects the six-level building through shifting light and shadow. Its windows are covered in a prismatic film that periodically splits the available sunlight, an effect that changes according to the time of day and season.

"University buildings need to focus as incubators for interaction between students and faculty. It was a pleasure working with a university that was willing to broaden its design approach by including our staircase that now functions as the backbone of the building," says Steven Holl.

Offices and seminar rooms on the upper floors are rendered in different shades and textures of black and white, inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's book Remarks on Color. The architects also designed furniture, light fixtures, coat hooks, and door handles for the department.

Steven Holl, a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, founded Steven Holl Architects in 1976. The firm's previous academic buildings include the Simmons Hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota.

 Images copyright Andy Ryan