The Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center is a new medical education building at Columbia University in New York City. Incorporating the latest pedagogical innovations, the building encourages team-based learning and problem solving among students across medical specialties. Its defining feature is the ‘Study Cascade,’ an interconnected network of exuberant, airy, and light-filled spaces that extends from the street up the façade of the 14-story building. The Cascade twists and turns to shape a series of finely tuned formal and informal environments, ranging from small to large, intimate to communal, single to triple height, indoor to outdoor, inward-focused to extroverted— all modulated in relation to sound and light.
Post-Occupancy responds to the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale's Freespace theme by presenting the Vagelos Center’s alternative attitude to flexibility, one that emphasizes spatial variety over one-size-fits-all adaptability. Here, unlike traditional medical education buildings, the goal is not to standardize and optimize every square meter of usable space, but rather to contribute to a feeling of wellbeing. Exhibited in the Biennale Arsenale alongside a 1:40 scale model, a two-channel video installation captures this productive inefficiency as a day in the life of a student. Directed by DS+R and Andrew Fierberg, the film depicts a side by side, internal and external observation of the Study Cascade.
