City College of N.Y. Gears Up to Open Viñoly Architecture-School Building

Rafael Viñoly Architects designed this City College of New York building to reuse the skeleton of an older structure. (City College of New York photo)

After several years of delays, the City University of New York’s City College is preparing to open a new building for its School of Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture. The Modernist building, designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects, reuses the skeleton of a structure erected in 1955 as the college’s library. It has already been reconfigured once before, in the 1980s, when it was converted to offices and classrooms.

This time, however, the structure was stripped down to its steel frame, and a new building was constructed around that. The 115,000-square-foot building, originally expected to open in 2005, is now due to open for the spring semester. True to Mr. Viñoly’s reputation for splashy gestures — such as the glassy atrium of the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business — the building will have an elaborate new roof structure that will admit daylight to studios below and double as an outdoor amphitheater.