CultureNOW - Campbell Sports Center: Steven Holl Architects

Campbell Sports Center

Architect
Steven Holl Architects

Dates

Constructed, 2013

Awards

AIANY Chapter Design Award 2014

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Description

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Located on the corner of West 218th street and Broadway—the northernmost edge of Manhattan, where Broadway crosses with Tenth Avenue and the elevated tracks of the 1 subway line—the Campbell Sports Center forms a new gateway to the Baker Athletics Complex, the primary athletics facility for the Columbia University’s outdoor sports program.

The first new athletics building to be constructed on Columbia University's campus since the Marcellus Hartley Dodge Physical Fitness Center was built in the mid-1970s, the Campbell Sports Center will be the new cornerstone of the revitalized Baker Athletics Complex and provides increased program space for the entire intercollegiate athletics program. The facility, which adds approximately 48,000 square foot of space, houses
strength and conditioning spaces, offices for varsity sports, theater-style meeting rooms, a hospitality suite and student-athlete study rooms.

The Campbell Sports Center aims at serving the mind, the body and the mind/body for aspiring scholar-athletes. The design concept “points on the ground, lines in space”—like field play diagrams used for football, soccer, and baseball—develops from point foundations on the sloping site. Just as points and lines in diagrams yield the
physical push and pull on the field, the building’s elevations push and pull in space.

The building shapes an urban corner on Broadway and 218th street, then lifts up to form a portal, connecting the playing field with the streetscape. Extending over a stepped landscape, blue soffits heighten the openness of the urban scale portico to the Baker Athletics Complex. Terraces and external stairs, which serve as “lines in space,” draw the field play onto and into the building and give views from the upper levels over the field and Manhattan.

NY Times Critic Michael Kimmelman said of the building, "It rises over a shambolic jumble of single-story bus depots and auto repair shops, Campbell's sanded-aluminum panels picking up on the industrial vibe and vocabulary of the Broadway Bridge, with its twin raised steel towers, a few blocks north. The subway rumbles straight past the picture windows of the center's second-story, double-height gym, where the college's football team routinely works out to a deafening soundtrack: muscle and heavy metal, inside and out. "

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Location

West 218th St & Broadway
New York, NY 10034
United States

Nearby Items

Columbia University Boathouse		378 feet
Elevated Nature II		0.2 miles
Elevated Nature III		0.2 miles
Columbia University Lawrence A. Wien Stadium		0.2 miles
Broadway Bridge		0.3 miles
Isham Park		0.5 miles
Isham Park Garden Mural		0.6 miles