Jerome L. Green Science Center

The Jerome L. Greene Science Center rises on Columbia University's Manhattanville campus, just west of Broadway, as what architect Renzo Piano called a "palace of light." Nearly all of its ten-story envelope is transparent floor-to-ceiling glass, built across six different facade types — high-performance structural glazing, double-skin walls, and metal-and-glass canopies — so the building reads as almost entirely see-through from the street. At 450,000 square feet, it's the largest building Columbia has ever constructed and the biggest academic science building in New York City.

Piano spent months in conversation with Columbia's neuroscientists before designing the building, and that transparency is deliberate: it opens the labs of the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute to public view, treating scientific research itself as something worth putting on display. Exposed steel structure and rooftop mechanical systems are left visible rather than hidden, nodding to the industrial history of the Manhattanville site while giving the building an unfinished, working-lab honesty.