Fiterman Hall (BMCC)

The original Fiterman Hall, 15 storeys tall at 30 West Broadway, extended the Chambers Street campus of the Borough of Manhattan Community College. When 7 World Trade Center fell against it on 11 September 2001, it was damaged beyond repair, and the college lost a third of its classroom space.

Insurance talks, detailed dismantling plans to satisfy regulators and funding disputes held the project up until November 2008, when the city agreed to put up $139 million of its estimated $325 million cost; decontamination of the old building had begun that March. The new building mostly reuses the old foundation walls and adds 43 drilled caissons; foundation work started in early December 2009. It opened for the 2012-2013 academic year.

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners designed the building; Yvonne Szeto was lead designer, and the firm handled programming, architecture, the exterior envelope, interiors and furniture procurement. Of the many hurdles, which included cleaning up the site and deconstructing the old building, fitting a vertical campus of 15 program levels on a fairly small site was the toughest.

Its steel frame is wrapped in precast panels with a brick face and in a curtain wall of metal and glass. Teaching programs come in two-floor packages: behind both the north and south facades rises a stack of two-storey atriums, each with a spiral stair joining its floors and a lounge for students. Between classes people move up and down by these stairs, and the lounges let them stay on their program's floors for much of the day. The top two floors hold a conference center.

There are two main entrances. One, at the northwest corner, connects to the campus to the north. The south entrance faces the new triangular park, beyond which lies the World Trade Center site; through it one reaches a raised terrace with a public café and goes straight into the art gallery. The building has LEED Silver certification.

The building is the base of four major academic programs and holds much of the college's general education teaching. Besides classrooms and computer labs, it has offices, library space and assembly rooms. Its ground-floor art gallery is the Shirley Fiterman Art Center.

The gallery is open to the public Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m., or by appointment; the entrance is at 81 Barclay Street. From the sidewalk, passers-by can view the shows through the windows along Barclay Street, Park Place and West Broadway.