Columbia University in the City of New York

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Should Columbia University permit taller buildings on the main campus? I say YES. The key reason for the expansion into Manhattanville is because the main campus on Morningside Heights has more demand than supply. The influx of students has proved a necessity to build outward. Since its founding Columbia has expanded ever so smoothly with incremental increases in the student body size. As the times have changed so have the campus and the university. The school relocated several times, first from Downtown (Trinity Church) to Midtown (Madison Ave) to the current Uptown (Morningside Heights) campus, and was going to relocate back to Midtown (West Side) in the early 2000's. As the need for space has presented itself the school has delivered, and will again with the Manhattanville expansion. BUT building 6-7 floor buildings is not that far from building 3-4 floor buildings, and taller buildings can delay an expansion and provide immediate space. For suburban and rural campuses building outward is a uniform apparent. If there was ever a campus that could, would, and should build and sustain taller buildings, it is a campus in - the heart of the skyscraper - New York City. As long as the charm and historic nature of the campus are unscathed, the sky is the limit for Columbia University.

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My 3D model of Low Library.

[hunser]

Columbia University ... I got my B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics there. Had a wonderful time, maybe the best time in my life.

[chris08876]

^^^^^

If I knew that, I could of used your help in Calc 2. I was so lost in that course. I found calc 3 way easier and differential, but to this day, I can't for the life of me do the chain rule, and that kinda made it hard to do those trig integrals later on that required it. Good thing for the ti-89!

But anyways, congrats. Columbia is an awesome school for math. You must be kickass at it if you did it at Columbia. Although idk how they compare to MIT math, but its probably just as hard.

[hunser]

Originally Posted by chris08876

^^^^^

If I knew that, I could of used your help in Calc 2. I was so lost in that course. I found calc 3 way easier and differential, but to this day, I can't for the life of me do the chain rule, and that kinda made it hard to do those trig integrals later on that required it. Good thing for the ti-89!

But anyways, congrats. Columbia is an awesome school for math. You must be kickass at it if you did it at Columbia. Although idk how they compare to MIT math, but its probably just as hard.

Haha, yeah ... the chain rule. Many scientist don't like it. Columbia wasn't that hard for me, as my knowledge (Vienna University of Technology) was pretty good and also diversified. MIT of course is just another level. Now I'm back in Vienna and doing my Master's ...

As for this thread, the CU ist just great architecture. Altough the main building of the TU Wien is quite beautiful, the math/physics department ist just plain ugly.

EDIT: I just remembered that I got my Linear Algebra Book by Gilbert Strang, who is a professor at MIT. Surprisingly it was an easy read.

[chris08876]

Yea Strang is pretty easy. He has some nice videos on MIT Opencourseware which are great with the book on your side. I'm sure you probably have it but Foundations of Modern Analysis by Friedman is an awesome book. Difficult, but all of the proofs and concepts are there. Working through it, you really appreciate the complexity of math and what it is capable of. It is a slow read though, but for such a topic, it is common to spend an hour or two on just a couple pages given the complexity and nailing down the concepts. Rudin is also another good one for that topic. But anyways, thats enough off topic for the day.

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Soon after the unfortunate destruction of Penn Station in 1963, preservation movements and programs swept the country. This past week one of those many programs celebrated its 50th anniversary.

Columbia’s Historic Preservation program—the first of its kind in the United States— is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. It has grown from one course with six enrolled students into a two-year Master of Science degree. Its community of 1,200 students, alumni, faculty and friends celebrate this weekend with a new exhibit, “HP at 50,” in Avery Hall.

Historic Preservation – the management and conservation of our built heritage – is one of the world’s most exciting professions and a chance for you to do creative work with your previous studies, be they in history, chemistry, anthropology, architecture, or any other field. As a young architectural historian, I came to the profession of Historic Preservation because I wanted to change the world. I wanted to enter a profession where the individual can make a difference. This was the best decision that I ever made, since it resulted in my involvement in a profession that is a progressive force in the creation of better communities for everyone. I hope that you will share this adventure with us. I believe that there are still many opportunities for the professional preservationist to act for good within communities, and I invite you to bring your skills to the task.

At Columbia, we have a multi-disciplinary curriculum that is taught by the largest and most diverse group of professors of any preservation program in the country. Course work is grounded in a solid core. With this basic knowledge students have the opportunity to follow their own unique paths of investigation. The program is lucky in its location in New York City, as we use the extraordinary resources of this metropolis as a teaching tool. But far from being parochial, we hope that each student will branch out in her or his course work and internship, bringing what they have learned in class to projects throughout the United States and all over the world. Indeed, graduates of this program are leaders in preservation across the country and around the globe.

Historic Preservation is a dynamic field. As the profession changes, so do the curriculum and focus of our teaching. Columbia’s Historic Preservation Program, the oldest in the United States, continues to be in the forefront of preservation education and we invite you to investigate our website, visit our facilities, and embark on a career in this most exciting profession.
I look forward to meeting you soon at Columbia!

- Andrew S. Dolkart

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Columbia University Reports 17.5% Return on Endowment

NY Times

Columbia University’s endowment on Wednesday reported a 17.5 percent return for the latest fiscal year, trailing the Ivy League leader so far, Yale.

The return for Columbia, which brings the endowment’s value to $9.2 billion, compared with the 20.2 percent return for Yale. But it was significantly higher than the 15.4 percent generated by Harvard. Harvard still has the largest endowment, at $36.4 billion, while Yale’s is $23.9 billion. In 2013, Yale generated a 12.5 percent return, compared with 11.5 percent for Columbia.

Columbia also trailed Dartmouth, which posted a return of 19.2 percent, and tied with the University of Pennsylvania. Some schools, including Princeton University, have yet to release figures.

While Columbia’s performance appears to have cooled over the last two years, its 10-year performance is tied with Yale at an 11 percent average annual return.

In the endowment world, managers had been curious to see the returns for Columbia, whose results in 2010 and 2011 were the strongest among the Ivy League schools, eclipsing Yale. Yale’s endowment, run by David F. Swensen, had been the best-performing endowment for many years. Nirmal Narvekar, who runs Columbia’s endowment, has created an impressive record, though little is known about his investment style because the endowment does not release asset allocations.

Many schools have followed Mr. Swensen’s investment model of creating a diversified portfolio with a strong percentage allocated to illiquid investments. That approach came under attack after the financial meltdown, when their portfolios performed poorly in relation to simpler ones made up of stocks and bonds. But the latest numbers from schools that follow the Yale strategy have been strong.

Both Columbia and Yale outpaced the average annual return for 138 schools of 7.6 percent, according to Cambridge Associates, an institutional-investment adviser with a large number of endowment clients. Both schools also outpaced domestic stocks, which returned an average of 8.4 percent over 10 years, and bonds, which returned 4.9 percent.

[SLO]

Neat thread. I have no experience with Columbia although it looks incredible. My sons room mate at UCLA has a sister at Columbia and she plans to go to UCLA for grad school. What a great and varied experience to from from NYC to LA.
Seeing the caliber of kids at these schools is incredible to, this kid had one sister at Columbia and the other just graduated from Stanford. His other room mate is from Hong Kong majoring in Astro Physics and has two brothers who also went to US schools and are both in Phd programs.

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From Buddhist Sculpture to Andy Warhol, Columbia Houses a Museum’s Worth of Cultural Treasures


columbia.edu

Hidden within plain sight around Columbia's campuses is a museum's worth of art donated to the University over the past two centuries. The 15,000 objects in Art Properties enliven public spaces, decorate offices, adorn the Faculty Room at Low Library, and are stored in a vault in the recesses of Avery Hall.

The collection, part of Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, reflects all cultures, time periods and media, from Neolithic pottery, Chinese ritual bronzes, Etruscan pottery and Mesopotamian cylinder seals to Polaroids and black-and-white silver gelatin prints taken by Andy Warhol in the 1970s and ’80s and used for his portrait paintings of celebrities, royalty, drag queens and others.

Roberto C. Ferrari, an art historian and librarian, was hired as the new curator of Art Properties in 2013. He previously worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he oversaw digitization projects in the museum’s Digital Media department. In the short time he’s been at Columbia, he has already started reshaping Art Properties.

Ferrari said that historically, Art Properties had been perceived largely as a decorative collection since many of the pieces embellish offices and public spaces. But recently, he added, “the department’s mission as a study collection is being given more attention, focusing on education-related programming and curricular integration.”

Last spring Ferrari worked with Robert E. Harrist Jr., the Jane and Leopold Swergold Professor of Chinese Art History, and Ph.D. students in his curatorial seminar on Chinese art to conduct research on the Chinese bronzes and ceramics and Buddhist stone sculptures on permanent display in Low’s Faculty Room. Most of the material, a gift of the renowned psychiatrist, art collector and philanthropist Dr. Arthur M. Sackler, hadn’t been touched since it was first displayed in cases there around 1970. Sackler, of whom it was said, “he waves his arm and a museum wing appears,” gave more than 2,000 Asian artworks to Columbia.

Working with curatorial specialists from the Metropolitan and the Harvard Art Museums, the students conducted a hands-on study of the objects. Their research led to updated catalog entries as well as object labels that were used when Ferrari and his team reinstalled the works in August. As an added bonus, pieces of Korean ceramics, also from the Sackler collections, were temporarily displayed in the Faculty Room, where they were identified by retired Harvard curator Robert Mowry as being very important works in the history and production of Korean ceramics.

Last winter, to raise awareness about Columbia’s sculpture, Ferrari started a blog, Public Outdoor Sculpture at Columbia, that features updates about the works and a Google map for self-guided tours.

In a recent post Ferrari discussed the cleaning last summer of three of the University’s most recognizable bronze sculptures: William Ordway Partridge’s statues of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. Since the Jefferson statue is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, the time was ripe for its facelift. And the Rodin, recently vandalized when someone brushed and sprayed gold paint onto parts of it, needed treatment to remove the paint and restore the protective wax finish.

Other well-known works at the University include sculptures by Henry Moore and Anna Hyatt Huntington as well as Daniel Chester French’s iconic Alma Mater on Low’s steps. The collection also includes the largest repository of paintings and drawings by Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944), a New York-based artist whose paintings also can be found in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan Museum. A selection of her works from Art Properties and Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library are now on loan to the Lenbachhaus in Munich through January for the first international retrospective of Stettheimer's work.

Assisting Ferrari is a team whose duties include inventorying and documenting objects in Art Properties’ collection. He and his colleagues spend a good deal of time inspecting paintings and other works hanging in offices and galleries. Because there is a limit to how much of the collection can be showcased in this way, they have begun developing an online inventory and exploring social media options to make more of the collection digitally accessible not only to the Columbia community, but to art lovers everywhere.

“Our goal is to spread the word about this vital part of Columbia’s cultural heritage,” Ferrari said. “Like many great museums, much of the art remains in storage, hidden from view, but we’re working to change that.”

By Eve Glasberg

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Columbia Nursing Breaks Ground on its New Home


columbia.edu

The new building will be constructed at 168th Street and Audubon Avenue, a few blocks from its current facility, located at 617 W. 168th Street in the Washington Heights neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. Among the seven-story structure’s many features will be a sunlit atrium lobby, rooftop garden terrace, and a two-floor, state-of-the-art simulation center equipped with lifelike mannequins that imitate real-life medical conditions giving students the opportunity to learn skills in a safe, educational environment.

“The future of nursing and nursing education will soon have a new address,” said Bobbie Berkowitz, PhD, RN, FAAN, Dean of the Columbia University School of Nursing and Senior Vice President of the Columbia University Medical Center. “Our new building brings renewed focus to our education and research mission at a time when advanced practice nurses are playing an ever-greater role in the health-care delivery system.”

The new building, designed by award-winning architectural firm CO|FXFOWLE (link is external) to achieve LEED Silver (link is external), will also feature flexible areas accommodating either large or small group learning, as well as students seeking space for individual study.

Columbia University School of Nursing, founded in 1892, is one of the first nursing schools to offer the clinical practice doctorate, the Doctor of Nursing Practice degree. A leader in nursing research, the school also has the nation’s oldest continuous program in nurse midwifery.

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Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood, along with New Jersey. Both the main campus and Columbia Medical Center are visible.

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The Morningside Heights of yesteryear

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Columbia University and Barnard College circa 1932

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Behind the concrete heights of One57 lies Morningside Heights

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Central Park West and Acropolis

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Wicked shots.

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