Kravis Hall

Henry R. Kravis Hall rises eleven stories on the edge of Columbia's Manhattanville campus, near Twelfth Avenue, as part of a glass-clad district designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with FXCollaborative. Its facade alternates bands of clear and fritted glass in a "layer-cake" rhythm that mirrors the building's internal organization — floors of academic classrooms interleaved with faculty offices, each expressed differently on the outside. Clear glazing, pulled back from the floor's edge, marks the academic levels; fritted glass, mounted flush with the slab, wraps the faculty floors above.

The panels themselves are technical feats — uniquely sized glass fiber reinforced gypsum units up to 28 feet long, developed with engineers at Arup and sloped to shed water invisibly. The result is a building that looks crystalline and faceted from the street, its layered transparency making the school's daily life legible from outside, part of a broader campus built on the idea that a university should be porous to the neighborhood around it.