www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13...3moneo.html

But few sites have proved as challenging as his latest, at Broadway and West 120th Street, for which he has designed a $200 million interdisciplinary science building, now under construction, for Columbia University. It’s not just that this project involves inserting contemporary glass-and-aluminum architecture into a corner of Columbia’s main Morningside Heights campus, a landscape dominated by the historic masonry of McKim, Mead & White. Mr. Moneo, who had never before designed a building in New York City, also had to grapple with placing a tall building on top of the existing gymnasium without crushing it or even interrupting the basketball season — a daunting engineering task.

“It isn’t an easy building,” Mr. Moneo said one day recently, as he walked through the construction site. “The conditions were so difficult.”

The building, to open next fall, will rise 14 stories and contain 50,000 square feet of laboratories; a science library for physics, chemistry, biology and psychology; a 170-seat lecture hall; and a cafe visible from the street and open to the public. To put nine stories of that content above the gym, Mr. Moneo and his engineers devised a truss system, partly visible in the diagonal lines that punctuate the facade, which transfers the weight of the 120-foot span to columns at either end.

“It is a complete building, spanning over the gymnasium but not touching the gymnasium,” Mr. Moneo said. “The building is literally floating.”