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At New York University, Davis Brody Bond and KieranTimberlake enclose a complex and varied program within a highly tuned building skin.
THE JOHN A. PAULSON Center, designed by Davis Brody Bond and KieranTimberlake, is hard to miss. The 735,000square-foot structure is the latest addition to New York University's Washington Square Park-area campus in Manhattan, and commands a block-long site at the border of the SoHo and Greenwich Village historic districts.
It replaces the Coles Sports and Recreation Center, a squat, one-story concrete structure built in 1981. The project's goals were to consolidate previously dispersed school programs in a single location and create muchneeded student and faculty housing, along with classrooms, state-of-the-art athletic facilities, and performance spaces, including three theaters and a music-recital hall.
If that programmatic complexity sounds challenging, that's because it is, and a great conundrum for the design team was how to bridge those many functions in a legible manner. The massing is formidable, though broken up into multiple segments: the Paulson Center includes a five-story academic podium enclosing the classrooms and the performance spaces, a dining hall,...