Confronted with two extreme instances of building in a context of recognized historical significance – one, a famous university campus plan designed by McKim, Mead, and White, the other an archetypical suburban neo-Norman church – the goal was to combine a sympathetic postmodern respect for the original architectural perspective with the principles of the modern impulse.

The Uris Hall addition to the Columbia Business School presented a twofold contextual challenge. The requested addition stood opposite the original Palladian rotunda designed by McKim, Mead and White as the centerpiece for the new Columbia campus in 1903, but it was attached to the nine-story aluminum and glass high-rise, a 1964 developer-designed modern building that violated every aspect of the original campus design and composition.

The university first asked for simple extensions on either side of the existing business school, which would simply have attached “ears” to the ungainly building. Instead the interior plan and circulation was reorganized with a new entrance hall and façade design, which in fact created a “mask” that concealed most of the offending building from campus view.

The limestone-clad facade established the appropriate scale and character to engage in the kind of contextual conversation with the Palladian rotunda across the courtyard that McKim, Mead and White had originally envisioned. New windows were set in groups of two and extended their surrounds beyond their floor levels in order to match the unusually tall windows of the original campus buildings. The central figure, a curtain wall that spans two floors, is meant to read as both opaque, in deference to the neighboring facades, and also transparent in a gesture to the modern preference for open and continuous space.