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A Cut through Columbia

At one time, the stretch of 116st Street through Columbia was a public road that was then privatized and incorporated into the gates of the university. Underneath the entire university as well as the gated area of 116th Street is a system of tunnels that presently is used primarily for mechanical equipment and access between buildings for students with disabilities. By restructuring and repurposing these existing infrastructures, what is private becomes public again. My proposal is to integrate a large ramp that allows direct access to the subway by bisecting the main axis of the campus. By breaking the beaux art symmetry of Columbia University and reorienting a previously public road, the memory of the gym in Morningside Park will come alive—the memory of taking a public entity and privatizing it—while the design simultaneously takes on the inverse condition of the gym, where a private road becomes public again by accommodating the program of the unbuilt gym. By interweaving the 116th Street station inside the confines of the campus, the threshold between New York City, the MTA, and Columbia University begins to blur into a programmatic gym and access spaces for Manhattan residents, commuters, and students.