But in terms of actual new, completed projects, 2012 has been a lean year. This is largely the fault of the recession. Downturns tend to stifle development generally, but especially when the heart of the slow down is a real estate bubble. Design can actually be at its best just after the bubble bursts, and the gaudiest visions are getting wrapped up. And so, there are no Frank Gehry towers or Diller, Scofidio + Renfro cultural confections this year.

Still, there are surprises to be found in the city, as always. Maybe a little humbler, a little less showy, but also perhaps better for New York’s character, its peace of mind, its future. This is sensible architecture for a wiser time.

In many ways, this was the year of the public space and the park, a development that makes all the more sense in light of Zucotti Park and the opening of Louis Kahn’s Four Freedoms memorial. Whoever knew what a POPS was until now, or that a grand vision from 40 years ago could ever get built, and be one of a celebrated architect's best works, at that? And continuing a trend throughout the Bloomberg era, many of these public spaces are on the waterfront.

Another Bloomberg hallmark? Many of these notable projects are public works, civic architecture on the highest order, and an important reason the quality of life in New York continues to rise.

In line with the post-bubble brunt of design in the city at the moment, no housing projects made the list this year, after dominating it in the past, New York by Gehry, Jean Nouvel's 100 11th Avenue and Neil DeNari's HL23 among them. Another major development is the continued pull of gravity across the East River—barely half of the projects are in Manhattan, with five of them in Brooklyn. If there were any doubt the borough has arrived, look no further than its bold new buildings.

In honor of the station's 100th anniversary next year, the Architectural League and the Transit Museum teamed up to host a drawing competition calling for "architectural sketches for a contemporary terminal." Well, contemporary they sure are. Among the 20 winners (all on display on the League's website) are some conventional, and quite lovely, renderings of the station. But there are also some dynamic, dizzying, dreamy and deconstucted ones as well, which The Observer liked best and has collected here.

A special edition Moleskine notebook, available at the Transit Museum, has been produced to honor the drawings, as well as containing historical info and images about Grand Central. And it still leaves room for your own sketches, of course.

Wouldn't it be something if this was the Grand Central of the future? Just watch your step.

A hypothetical skyline, with 225 West 57th at right, One57 middle, 432 Park at left. (Curbed/NYO)

1780 Broadway, the one piece that will remain. (City Realty)

If King Kong were to swing into New York sometime this decade, he might actually have a hard time figuring out where to go.

In the original 1933 black-and-white classic, King Kong famously scales the two-year-old Empire State Building, cementing it in the conscience of the world as arguably its most famous skyscraper. Four decades later, the giant gorilla set his sights higher, standing astride the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Today, perhaps he might climb atop their succesor, the new 1 World Trade Center. But one gets the sense that King Kong is given to gigantism, so only the city’s tallest tower will do.

Until a few months ago, that would have been 1 World Trade. But since 432 Park Avenue began to rise skyward in April, the 1,397-foot condo tower developed by Harry Macklowe and CIM on the old Drake Hotel site would have claimed the skyline crown. It beats out its downtown rival by 29 feet, so long as one ignores the silly 400-foot sorta spire atop 1 World Trade. Should King Kong arrive sometime in 2014, this slinky tower would probably be his choice.

But a year or two after that, and he might turn his gaze further down 57th Street, past the already striking 1,005-foot One57 tower, Gary Barnett's billionaire bauble nearing completion despite that crane accident. There it would settle on another tower being developed by Mr. Barnett, at 225 West 57th Street, just one block from what was already going to be the city's tallest apartment building when it opens next year. The new tower's height, according to building permits filed last week: 1,550 feet. 

That would make it the world's sixth tallest building—at least until something else comes along and knocks it off its pedestal.

That is a good 50 percent taller than either the Chrysler Building or One57, while all three are about the same size, between 1.2 and 1.4 million square feet. The tower will be slender, but it will also be solid unlike some of its spindly rivals, notably 432 Park and predecessors like the Trump World Tower. (Amazing how that held the record for tallest apartment building for a decade, surpassed by only a few feet by Frank Gehry's Spruce Street tower, and now, it's just off to the races, especially when the 1,050-foot MoMA tower is added into the mix. And never mind all the super-tall office towers on the horizon, like the 1,300-footer at Hudson Yards and all those maybe-taller towers coming out of the Midtown East rezoning.)

The tower will reach 88 stories, which sounds like a lot, but when the overall height is considered, that belies exceedingly high ceilings. At the same time, much extra space will also likely be devoted to mechanical systems to keep such a colossus running, as well as the fact that the first five floors, as construction documents show, will be given over to a Nordstrom, as was announced in July. On the seventh through 12th floors, there will be a hotel, and then, boom, 223 residential units. That is almost twice as many units as One57, though the hotel is also considerably larger there.

"I don't want to confirm anything except to say we've filed permits," Mr. Barnett told The Observer Monday by phone, when asked if the project had financing and was set to rise.

As noted by the eager architecture savants on Skyscraper City and Wired New York, who first noticed the building permits yesterday, construction equipment is already on hand at 217 West 57th Street, one of the lots Mr. Barnett controls and will be building on some day. Similarly, the Morton Williams grocery story at 225 West 57th Street closed last month, paving the way for demolition of that building and its replacement to rise.

This is one of Mr. Barnett's most complicated deals ever, requiring the assemblage of numerous parcels of land and air rights from surrounding buildings and properties, including tax lot mergers and air rights purchases, essentially turning the entire block into a piece of the project, even if some of the buildings thereon will remain standing. "We've been at this seven or eight years," Mr. Barnett said. "We've bought different parcels and air rights, etc, etc, and here we are." Building documents show no fewer than nine different parcels tied up in creating the lot.

Back in the spring, Mr. Barnett told The Observer he was still working on assembling pieces for the project, with the implication that the goal would be to reclaim the title of New York's tallest apartment tower. (The Burj Khalifa in Dubai still boasts the world record, with apartments through the tower's 108th floor.) Previously, it had been speculated that 225 West 57th Street would top out around 1,250 feet, but Mr. Barnett has pushed beyond that to new heights.

"There won't be a spire or anything like that, the floors will go all the way to the top, or almost to the top, with some mechanicals above," Mr. Barnett said. "This is not a gimmick."

On the highest occupiable floor, the 85th, construction documents call for a "residential accessory lounge open to sky." Apartments will be from the 15th through 84th floors, with no mention of layouts (full-floor, duplex, etc.). The building permits also mention another residential lounge on the 14th floor, and the seventh floor houses a number of amenities for the hotel: a restaurant, salon, gym, lounge and "sky lobby." The ground floor has separate entrances for the Nordstrom, the hotel and the residences.

One thing that will not be new is the facade along Broadway, the former BF Goodrich building. Because of a deal struck with the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2009, the old auto building at 225 West 57th can come down, despite the protests of preservationists, but its sibling at 1780 Broadway must remain. A 1920s red brick building, its 12-story facade must be integrated into whatever Mr. Barnett builds. The building will have T-shaped configuration as a result, with section on Broaway, 57th and 58th streets.

What lucky architect gets to design such a multifaceted project? The Observer had heard that Herzog & de Meuron had beat out the likes of Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster and SHoP, but on that count, Mr. Barnett demured. "I'm not going to confirm or deny that, but I wouldn't print that if I were you," he said. The associate architects listed on the construction documents are Adamson Associates, who were the architects of record on all three of Larry Silverstein's World Trade Center towers, Durst's One Bryant Park, the Goldman Sachs headquarters and the still unbuilt MoMA Tower by Mr. Nouvel. So whomever the architect is, it must be a pretty high caliber firm.

Still, Mr. Barnett is taking nothing for granted. When The Observer tried to congratulate him on a new project, and the city's tallest at that, he responded, "Congratulations are only in order when you've finished the building and cashed the last check."

"We're just working hard and hoping the market stays healthy," he added.

No doubt when this project is finally finished some years from now, Mr. Barnett will stand atop it, perhaps out on the residential accessory lounge open to the sky and thumping his chest in triumph. King Kong certainly would.

The king has his crown. (Matt Chaban)

The finished product. (Extell)

The MAS Summit has offered plenty of rousing discussions about design and architecture in the city, and cities around the globe, for the past two days at the Time Warner Center. But there was also an unexpected architectural treat outside. As readers are well aware, we here at The Observer are rather obsessed with One57 and its skyward march. Now, for the first time we have seen, the curving cornice of the building has been installed.

This revelation was exciting not simply for the continued progress of the city's biggest apartment building and the reshaping of the Central Park skyline, but also because of something we learned while reporting this week's feature on Goldstein, Hill & West: it was they, and not the celebrated Christian de Portzamparc, who is responsible for the crown of One57.

And in perhaps the firm’s greatest coup, the city’s biggest and grandest, apartment tower (for the moment), One57, is also a Goldstein, Hill & West production, according to two separate sources. French Pritzker Prize winner Christian de Portzamparc had been working on the building, but like so many other developers, Mr. Barnett turned the designs over to Mr. Hill to make them work.

When Kondylis & Partners dissolved, Mr. Barnett, and more specifically his bankers, were anxious about leaving Extell’s biggest project to date in the hands of an untested firm, no matter how experienced the partners. Mr. de Portzamparc was brought back on to reconceptualize the 1,005-foot tower, and he has gotten all the credit ever since. When asked about the switch, Mr. Hill said he still sees his design, its familiar bends and curves. “I feel like Christian put his skin over the building that we formed and shaped,” Mr. Hill said.

Mr. Barnett bristled at the assertion. “They were doing some work on it for a time, and we decided to go in a different direction,” he said. “Everything—the layouts, the plans—is different. That is an ugly thing for anybody to have said. It is untrue.”

The whole thing has us wondering: Who cares? Could you even tell if we hadn't mentioned it? Does this compare more—and more favorably—to the LVMH building (de Portzamparc) or the towers of Riverside South (Goldstein, Hill & West)?

It's the kind of question they would ask at the MAS Summit: What is design, and does it really matter?

"That's my next job, to find three more sites so I can build all these buildings," Mr. Levinson joked, seated at a conference table inside his sleek white offices on 57th Street on Monday. He was surrounded by renderings and models by Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Rem Koolhaas and the winning architect Norman Foster.

"For us, it was really a blend of what's the right concept for Park Avenue, a place that has not had a new building for almost 50 years, an avenue that is quite possibly the most important commercial boulevard in New York City, quite possibly the United State, and what is the place of a new build down the street from Seagrams and Lever House, two of the greatest buildings ever built," Mr. Levinson explained. "We had to determine for that setting what's the right firm. So really, it's a blend of the concept and the firm we can work with."

Mr. Levinson emphasized that this was not a traditional architecture competition, where he was selecting a design so much as a firm. He acknowledged that Lord Norman Foster had a head start, but as the competition got underway, that choice became harder to make.

"Things we knew early on about the Foster organization, it's a very deep bench with a great deal of knowledge about office buildings," Mr. Levinson said. "There is an emphasis on function, the techtonic aspect, but also an emphasis on form, how it fits into the Park Avenue context and makes an impact."

Foster proposed a set of three floating towers—Mr. Levinson called them separate buildings connected by a central spine—with each higher segment held aloft by dramatic trusses. In the spaces between the office blocks are vast open spaces, some 42-feet high, that will be open to building occupants and occasionally the public.

"We wanted to address the public realm, how does a building fit in to the public realm, the way people approach the building," Mr. Levinson said.

This was true of all the designs, but the way they addressed them were different. Rem Koolhaas conceived of a dramatically torqued building, with retractable walls throughhtout to reveal the spaces or protect them from the elements. Richard Rogers created what Mr. Levinson joked was an "Adirondack park." Like Mr. Foster's plan, there are three discreet office volumes, but here they are held up by a robust orange structure with diagonal cuts to make room for pocket parks, planted with tall pine trees—certainly nothing else like it in New York. Zaha Hadid created a sinuous building that resembles a giant white flower. It has cutouts at the base of the petals, in the towers four corners, which would have been open to the sky.

"Rogers we knew would have an exoskeleton, something very muscular, Zaha would create something real organic, Rem would have some movement and a very cerebral project and Foster would have elegance with an emphasis on the presence of the building," Mr. Levinson said.

It is a challenging commission since all the firms were given the task of peeling back 75 percent of the current boxy building that sits at 425 Park Avenue, then building back up from the base that remained. This was part of a zoning quirk that were Mr. Levinson to demolition the entire building, he would actually be forced to build something smaller than the current building, about 500,000 square feet compared to 650,000.

Mr. Levinson is eagerly awaiting the Midtown East rezoning, which might remove certain impediments to his project, like a better base to the building, but he also admitted that he does not expect to build an even bigger building, even though the new zoning would allow it, up to 24 FAR, compared to the 18 FAR the building currently has (current zoning only allow 15 FAR, but since the building was built before the zoning was revised in 1961, it is bigger than that).

"We are building a bespoke office building," Mr. Levinson explained. "I don't think we need to go much bigger than what we have now. Around Grand Central, bigger might work, but this is the Plaza District, this is a bespoke office building, and I believe this is the right size for us."

Mr. Levinson said he was not joking about finding a place for all these architects in his stable. "We actually do hope to work with all the firms in the future," Mr. Levinson said. No doubt the city's architecture cognoscenti hopes he does.

"Google didn't exist 25 years ago, Facebook didn't exist 25 years ago, even AOL didn't exist 25 years ago," Andrew Winters said on a recent afternoon. The director of capital projects and planning for Cornell NYC Tech, he was giving a preview of the the school's proposed Roosevelt Island campus in a large conference room inside the Wall Street offices of SOM, the master planners for the 12.5-acre project. Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize-winning L.A. architect designing the first academic building on the campus was also present, along with a number of other Cornell construction executives.

"The challenge," Mr. Winters continued, "is how do you create a tech campus today that is still flexible enough to grow and evolve for the next 25 years?"

This was not simply a philosophical question. Like all projects large and small in the city, Cornell NYC Tech would be defined by an unforgiving zoning text, a set of parcels, parameters, pathways and public open space, boxes, empty vessels into which the creative designs and desires of thousands of engineers and entrepreneurs would be filled for decades to come. The plan calls for four new buildings just south of the Queensboro Bridge by 2017 and six more by 2038, for a total of roughly 2 million square feet—about the size of the Google building in Chelsea.

The public review process, including specific plans for the first phase and more general ideas about the rest of the project, begins today when the City Planning Commission is expected to certify the project. It then faces half a year of intensive community scrutiny, though recent meetings on Roosevelt Island have shown broad, positive support for the campus. The site is already occupied by a 1930s hospital building set to be decommissioned next year. Once that happens, demolition will commence to make way for the campus.

The new campus may be looking for the future, but the very first problem it must tackle is as old as Noah. Because the project resides on an island, an especially narrow and low-lying one at that, it is highly susceptible to flooding. The first pieces of the campus created, then, was the main pathway, called the Tech Walk, that runs through the middle of the site, roughly along the highest point of the island. All buildings will have their primary entrances on this thoroughfare as a precaution against extreme flooding. "Code requires us to build to 100-year-flood standards, but with global warming, we're preparing for a 500-year-flood, which could become our new 100-year-flood," SOM associate director Colin Koop explained.

The geography of the city continues to define the shape of the campus, but from the Tech Walk, the designers—which also include James Corner Field Operations, the firm responsible for the High Line among other high-flying landscapes—turned their attention to the skyline. A number of important landmarks, including the U.N Building, the Empire State Building, the famous Pepsi sign in Long Island City, and the bridge and its massive piers, created vistas the team wanted to accentuate. They carved paths creating view corridors to these spaces, and filled in between the lines either with buildings, which the designers refer to as "nodes," or grand lawns and plazas, which are the "links" that will be among the campus' myriad public amenities.

"We wanted to create a cinematic experience, with framed views of different things," Mr. Koop said.

The team is also using this as an opportunity to redesign the road that encircles the campus, which is actually so old it does not meet current city requirements. The new configuration will create a wider esplanade along the water, followed by a bike lane (it is a college campus, after all), then a single driving and parking lane after that and a generous sidewalk beyond.

If the entire design of the site is meant to emphasize the river and the views beyond, the challenge for the buildings themselves is to be landmarks, as well, ones that create an unmistakeable presence for the campus without interrupting or overtaking the island on which they will rest. Only the academic building, the work of Mr. Mayne's firm Morphosis, has an explicit design so far. One design decision about it and almost every other building except for the two dorms is that they will be limited in height to five stories, or about as tall as the bed of the bridge. The two dorm buildings will not surpass the masts of the bridge, which reach about 300 feet above the island.

The first phase calls for one of the dormitory towers, a hotel conference center space for hosting events and visiting faculty and a so-called corporate co-location building where students and established tech firms and investors can meet to work. The centerpiece, though, is Mr. Mayne's academic building. Resembling an aircraft carrier from another planet (it even has a similar elongated pentagon shape), the specifics of the design are still being worked out. But like at Mr. Mayne's Cooper Union building, it will emphasize interactivity.

"Hallways aren't hallways anymore," the architect said. "They are the connection points where all the real work gets done, where the chance interactions inspirations take place." A huge atrium, perfectly aligned with 57th Street, will be the focal point of this work, creating a grand entrance for the students, faculty and visitors, and funneling them into a grand staircase connecting the five floors. Every landing has nooks for tables and couches to encourage public work and relaxation. Elevators are pushed to the edges of the building to discourage their use.

A large cafe, open to the public, is just off the atrium—Mr. Mayne joked that Starbucks is the new campus library—and retail will ring the building, providing an amenity not only for students but also Roosevelt Islanders, who are are starved for shopping.

The exact finish of the building is still to be determined, but by far its most striking feature will be a gigantic two-acre solar array, part of the promise to create a net-zero academic building that generates as much energy as it uses (for a tech project, that is an especially impressive task). "The site is challenging and the programming is challenging, but more than anything, net zero is challenging, and that decision has informed every aspect of this design" Mr. Mayne said. "This will be an absolute prototype."

Just like the ideas the campus is meant to elicit.

Last week, +POOL, that brilliant, crazy, possibly over-designed, possibly perfectly designed project that places a floating, self-filtering pool in the East River announced it was going to try and raise $1 million in the next six months to make its aquatic dreams come true. It is a prospect, which makes The Observer giddy with child-like joy. Swimming in the river, in river water no less.

That youthful excitement is infectious, especially when talking to Dong-Ping Wong, one +POOL’s founders. “It's a simple idea that didn't really come from anywhere," he explained in an interview. "As for ‘Why the idea?’ It was a combination of a few things, a hot and sweaty summer looking at the water, taking the train over the water, and riding my bike over the water but never really seeing it at all. I’m from San Diego, we use and view water very differently than we do from here."

Not that New York should be more like SoCal—heaven forbid—but it is true that we all live on the water (four out of five boroughs are on islands don't forget) and yet so rarely do we get the chance to interact with it.

Even with the funds, building the pools is not going to be easy. After all, the Olympic-sized +POOL will have to filter more than 500,000 gallons of river water a day to make it clean and safe. We wont say ‘make it swimmable’ because there are a few brave souls who take daily plunges in New York’s rivers already, but lets say, for the rest of us who still can’t shake the thought of local Superfund sites, +POOL has you covered.

The team has been working with engineers at ARUP and ecological consultants at One Nature to study the mechanical and environmental aspects of the pools filtration system, and they have learned all about enterococci and fecal coliform from professors at Columbia University. You don't have to go much further than that to understand the stream of contaminants that +POOL is trying to eliminate.

The feasibility of designing such an intricate filtration process is just one of the many issues surrounding the project, but Mr. Wong isn't worried. “When we first put it out there, it was three of us, and we all had similar reservations, cynicism," said Mr. Wong. "How will it work? Will anyone care about it? I mean not every New Yorker will really want to swim in the East River. But the more we looked into it, the more it seemed that not only is the technology already there, it just hasn't been thought of this way. I mean all the technology exists in some way or another.  In a weird way, the more we learned about it, the more the idea was right there in front of us."

More than a few New Yorkers seem to agree with him. The project first showed up on Kickstarter last year, but now the team has launched its own campaign, and even so, it is goingly swimmingly.

“Because it’s off of Kickstarter now, the audience is different that it might have reached on that website," Mr. Wong said. " Kickstarter is an awesome, basically readymade community, but what's great now is we’re also reaching a lot of people direct from the local community who we wanted to talk to anyway. In some ways the benefit of this campaign is that people are seeing it for the second time. The fact that we're still at it, is making people maybe even more excited than we were in the beginning.  It continually re-legitimizes this project.”

It’s hard not to compare any new park idea, especially one that springs so evidently from the same architecture and design world to that high-flying and High Line or low-lying Brooklyn Bridge Park did.

"This all could be a potentially new model for how architecture can be made," Mr. Wong said. "For us The High Line was so exciting to see happen. It started with two guys and took ten years. We feel like the pool has that kind of same potential."

The project is spilling over into other cities as a result. Tokyo, London, Cape Town and at least a few other cities have contacted the team about getting their own +POOLs. Right now, in fact, +POOL, has a sister endeavor in Sydney with a local city rep who is shepherding the idea through it’s very early stages along the same parallel municipal and city support that +POOL went through here. It’s an idea that came from the mayor of Syndney who had early on tweeted his support of the project.

“In many ways, they’re already ahead of New York in the way that they view their waterways,” Said Mr. Wong, “But there are a some places because of industry, shipping, where they still need a lot of work to actually clean it and besides the barriers are safe to swim in from wildlife. You know, sharks and all.”

It’s not a bad piece of branding if they wanted it.  In a world full of sharks and—ahem—contaminants, +POOL remains an idea worth diving into.

The project is being designed and managed by Moed de Armas & Shannon, a firm that specializes in lobby renovations and façade replacements. This may seem like minor work, but the firm has undertaken dozens of such projects in the city and elsewhere, from Lever House to the Hippodrome to First Canadian Place, Toronto’s tallest tower.

As the modernists skyscrapers of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s age, they do not always do so gracefully. Tastes change, windows leak. Meanwhile, vast improvements in technology make it appealing to update buildings because their improvement performance means a better experience for tenants and cost reductions through energy and maintenance savings. Plus, it just looks nicer. And in a tight place like Manhattan, tearing a building down and starting over may be impossible, especially after zoning laws have changed, making some buildings smaller than they otherwise might be.

“This renovation will dramatically enhance the building’s street presence," Dan Shannon, one of the partners of the firm, said in a release. "We worked hard to give the building a lobby it deserves—a monumental entry sequence with timeless materials and sophisticated detailing.”

The project will transform the 15,000-square-foot lobby of the nearly block-long building (built in 1961) as well as the surrounding exteriors and is expected to be completed in the spring. Among the remaining tenants in the 2 million-square-foot tower who will be enjoying the new digs are Wenner Media (of Rolling Stone and US Weekly fame), AXA Equitable, Brian Cave, Cushman & Wakefield and Warner Music Group.

For decades, the Bossert has served as a hostel for Jehovah's Witnesses stopping off at the global headquarters here, but as they are moving upstate and getting rid of all their property, developer David Bistricer stepped forward in May to turn the Bossert back into a boutique that still bears the same name it has for nearly a century.

He recently said that the hotel would not be under the banner of any national chains, and he is partnering with the mysterious Joseph Chetrit and the guys behind King & Grove, all of whom are working on the controversial conversion of the Hotel Chelsea.

The designer behind all this is none other than Gene Kaudman, also hard at work on the Chelsea, who has designed dozens of hotels around the city in recent years, mostly for those name-brand outlets Mr. Bistricer now eschews. Mr. Kaufman will be lucky on this project, considering the Witnesses, famous for the meticulous upkeep of all of their properties, have left the architect with an immaculate lobby, which renderings show will be little changed.

Upstairs, the story is different, with the number of rooms rising from 224 now to 300 suites when the renovations are completed. No idea what those will look like, but there has been talk of a rooftop bar overlooking the Heights, the harbor and the Manhattan skyline, which ought to be something.

“The Hotel Bossert is an exceptional building and one that should be open to welcome guests from across the country and around the world," Mr. Kaufman said in a release about the renovations. "Brooklyn has not only seen a residential explosion but thanks to a cultural coming of age the borough has also become a tourist destination yet it remains underserved by hotels."

With the boom in Brooklyn hotels, especially in one of the borough's poshest redoubts, this ought to be a perfect fit.

And you thought the High Line looked crazy. (Columbia)

This gives a whole new meaning to "in the heights."

Columbia University Medical Center has just announced that Diller Scofidio + Renfro will be designing a new 14-story medical building on Haven Avenue between 171st and 172nd streets that will be home to high-tech class facilities for all four CUMC colleges as well as the biomedical program within Columbia University's college of art and science.

The university tapped DS+R, along with Gensler, to create a new landmark for the medical center, one that will be visible from both the George Washington Bridge and Riverside Park.“The new building will have the best possible design that is attractive, comfortable, and appropriate for the intense kind of education that our students receive,” Dr. P. Roy Vagelos, a 1954 graduate of the school and former CEO of Merck, said in a release.

This is DS+R's latest project in the city, following on the huge successes of the High Line and Lincoln Center, as well as their early interior for Brasserie. It will also be the first vertical project for the firm, which tends to focus on cultural and institutional work, like museums and performance centers. This is not their first project for Columbia, however—the firm is also designing a new business school building named at Henry Kravis at the university's new Manhattanville campus.

“The new Medical and Graduate Education Building will be the social and academic anchor of the CUMC campus,” Elizabeth Diller said. “Spaces for education and socializing are intertwined to encourage new forms of collaborative learning among students and faculty.

This can be seen in the signature design feature, an exposed glass stack on the southern side of the building the designers call "the study cascade." Like the rest of Columbia's new buildings—many of which employ top designers in the field, like Steven Holl's nearby athletic center in Inwoof—the project will be sustainable, aiming for LEED Gold status. It is set to begin construction in 2013