Columbia Boathouse

The Boathouse is located in uptown Manhattan, next to a quiet neighborhood connected with Inwood Hill Park. It is at the intersection of Harlem River and Hudson River, with a variety of sports fields (of Columbia), as well as natural parks around. The site is surrounded by a series of rich public facilities, and beautiful sceneries.

The Columbia University racing boat team owns this building, where they store their racing boats, doing indoor trainings, and taking related classes. The boat house requires precise scales and dimensions to ensure the pragmatic functions, such as proper space for loading trucks, adequate room to fit all the racing boats, as well as viable route to turn and move the boat to the dock at the waterfront. Meanwhile, a community amateur racing boat club shares part of the building with the university team. So, the space distribution between university and community should also be balanced.

Due to the temperature changes in different time period of a year, racing boat is a sport that is exceedingly dependent on the climate and season changes. Neither the university nor the community could continue rowing in winter. According to the information given by the coach, the university team usually go to New Jersey for training and competition in Spring. They only spend four months every year training in this building, from June to September. In other words, the school facilities are idle during most time of the year. In every winter, the whole building would be empty. The key issue is how to take good advantage of the building when it is idle. Based on the natural resource in the site context, a public landscape system is introduced to merge with the boathouse, expanding the context as well as filling in the “blank”. As a result, this private athletic building obtains its public attribute that serves the community nearby, and at the same time, responds to the parks and waterfront in the context accordingly. In other words, this building becomes a mixture of half boathouse and half public landscape.

Therefore, the overall design of this building is around how to negotiate the space and circulation among the university sport team, the community club, and the public. The circulation of the three parties are diverged, so that they would not disturb each other.