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Campbell Sports Center

CompanySteven Holl Architects
Lead Designers
ClientSteven Holl
Prize(s)Bronze in Architecture Categories / Institutional
Project LinkView
Entry Description

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 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 is 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.