Q & A WITH
MARION WEISS

THE ARCHITECT

She’s half of the leading New York-based architecture design team Weiss/Manfredi. In 2003, Marion Weiss and her husband and partner, Michael Manfredi, emerged as the architects who would be charged with adding 70,000 square feet of space to Barnard’s campus, and to do so with a thoughtful blend of past, present, and future. Here, Weiss shares some thoughts about and reactions to tackling this project for Barnard, and previews more to come in the Spring 2007 issue of Barnard’s alumnae magazine.

What was your first reaction to the Nexus site?

The Barnard campus offers an amazing retreat from the city. It’s a very special, very intimate and intense environment. But we were concerned about how sectional the campus was—an excruciatingly steep set of stairs separated it into two worlds, Lehman lawn on one level and Milbank on another, making it feel much smaller than it needed to be. We believed our first task was to recreate the grounds of Barnard in a way that acknowledged how extraordinary it is, while negotiating the dramatic level changes. Our building is chameleon-like in that it links the campus, eliminates the cliff, and creates new visual connections between buildings.

What part of the project kept you up at night?

The budget [laughs]. Michael [Manfredi] and I spent a lot of time thinking about the main staircase, that we wouldn’t be able to achieve a great stair and meet all the fire codes. The Nexus brings many disciplines together into one building—dance, music, art, and architecture, and [it also includes] student life. We want to encourage what I call peripheral vision, or accidental encounters, the cross-fertilization of disciplines that makes the liberal arts experience unique. By creating long sight-lines through several stories we hope that students will look up from their coffee and become intrigued by their colleagues’ work in other parts of the building. The staircase plays an important role in this—it needs to invite people to move through the space. Without room to incorporate a second egress stair, the main stair, the one that we wanted to be visually interesting and monumental, also had to incorporate all the code requirements of a fire stair, including special fire-resistant glass, which is expensive.

How did your previous experiences inform the design of the Nexus?

I studied architecture as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia—where the landscape and the academic buildings work together very deliberately. Therefore, all of our work acknowledges the landscape, either sitting comfortably within it, or redefining it. Certainly the Olympic Park in Seattle does the latter—it negotiates many disparate pieces of the urban landscape, including the highway, the railroad, and the water. One of my goals for the Nexus was to pull the beauty of Lehman lawn into the building, so that everywhere within, you would feel connected to the landscape.

Describe the different facades of the building.

Barnard students choose to go here for the intense academic environment, but also for the urban experience—they choose New York. So we wanted to achieve a certain transparency, to show those in their cars, buses, and cabs, the wonderful things going on here. Columbia’s Broadway edge has a very different strategy—it’s fortress-like, informed by another time. But we thought Barnard should visually engage with the city, reflecting its students’ clear interest in the city itself. We chose a palette of glass for the Nexus—transparent, translucent, and opaque, to create a rhythm that works at the scale of the street, but also offers glimpses of the things happening within. The opaque glass is brick-colored, to make the building contextual without the heaviness of masonry.

Your firm designed a student center for Smith College five years ago.
Based on that experience, how are Smith students different from Barnard students?

Smith is in an idyllic landscape—a small college in a small, historic town, and I think that the students who go there are drawn to that environment. Barnard women, on the other hand, are clearly urban. They want everything the city has to offer them. They are as academic, naturally, but they chose New York City as well.

— Interview by Rachel Levitt

Q & A WITH MARION WEISS