How can a multi-use building in New York City embody the spirit of a university and foster new ways to connect, work, and learn?

Centered around Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, New York University’s campus exists within a dense mix of traditional and modern buildings. Because of this urban campus, the school’s various programs are dispersed across a number of separate buildings, each functioning with far less space than the University’s peer institutions. Based on University planning studies, NYU needed to increase space for faculty and students to strengthen its academic culture.

In addition to more classrooms, the University needed specialized space for its renowned performing arts programs, student and faculty housing, and athletic facilities. Working in collaboration with Davis Brody Bond, KieranTimberlake designed a building on the campus’s southern edge that would graciously accommodate NYU’s academic needs, embody its character and vibrancy, and offer new ways for the University to engage with its own community and the larger city of New York.

Fostering Connections

Designed to optimize interactions between diverse student groups and academic disciplines, the LEED Gold-certified John A. Paulson Center at 181 Mercer includes classrooms, informal study spaces, performing arts theaters, rehearsal and practice rooms, varsity sports arenas, a recreational sports gymnasium, and a café, as well as faculty and first-year student housing.

Each of these spaces is organized into unique “neighborhoods,” all of which are connected to an open and expansive commons that provides collaborative study, meeting, and gathering places.

Digital-Physical Prototyping

The Commons’ feature screening element required creating sweeping, three-dimensionally curved partitions that seamlessly transition between opaque wall, screening partition, and guardrail.

Digital-Physical Prototyping

The Paulson Center Commons’ feature screening element required creating sweeping, three-dimensionally curved partitions that seamlessly transition between opaque wall, screening partition, and guardrail.

The screens perform multiple roles as they flow through space: appearing nearly solid in some areas, opening to create sightlines between vertical ribs in others, and incorporating large horizontal viewports while meeting structural guardrail requirements. This complex programmatic choreography, combined with doubly-curved geometry spanning lengths up to 184 feet, demanded an innovative approach to both design development and fabrication.

KieranTimberlake began by producing in-house prototypes using CNC-milled foam to test scale, proportions, and spatial relationships. These mockups revealed that approaching the screens as assembled components rather than monolithic forms would provide flexibility for customization and cost control. The team systematically evaluated multiple materials and fabrication strategies—from ultra-high-performance concrete to thermoformed Corian to various wood and metal systems—assessing each against criteria including cost, durability, fire safety, weight, and sustainability.

The process engaged fabricators specializing in Direct Digital Manufacturing workflows, where components are generated directly from digital models. A full-scale white ash mockup incorporating different finish treatments demonstrated feasibility and refined the assembly strategy. The final approach uses CNC-milled components with carefully detailed joinery that minimizes visible seams, creating a continuous surface that transforms fluidly from opaque partition to transparent screen to structural guardrail.

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The Paulson Center’s design takes advantage of its 360-degree relationship with the neighborhood by placing hallway circulation along its transparent perimeter and classroom and instructional spaces towards the center of the building. This reversal of conventional building organization provides faculty and students with one-of-a-kind city views while also giving outside observers a sense of the building’s activity. This distinct layout, along with the building’s prominent stairways, creates a sense of openness and connection by encouraging the casual encounters and intellectual exchanges that are at the center of the NYU experience. Outside, the design continues to develop connections by creating a new pedestrian “greenway” that links two major thoroughfares along the building’s west side.

Emphasizing Sustainability

Designed in support of the NYU Climate Action Plan, the Paulson Center is committed to environmental responsibility and takes advantage of sustainable design strategies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, and the amount of waste generated during both construction and everyday use. The building is connected to NYU’s existing Co-Generation (CoGen) facility, a highly efficient, natural-gas-fueled power plant that simultaneously produces electricity, heat, and chilled water. In contrast to conventional energy sources, the CoGen plant substantially reduces not only the amount of resources used, but also greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants.

A Workflow for Complex Energy Analysis

Custom digital tools enabled enabling iterative performance testing and collaborative design descisions.

A Workflow for Complex Energy Analysis

The scale and complexity of the Paulson Center’s mixed-use program presented unique challenges for energy modeling. With hundreds of distinct spaces, each with different occupancy patterns, equipment loads, and ventilation requirements, tracking and coordinating this information across multiple teams and software platforms would have been enormously time-consuming using conventional methods.

To address this, KieranTimberlake and environmental consultants Atelier Ten developed a custom software workflow that automated the transfer of building geometry and energy parameters between design and analysis platforms. At the heart of this innovation was a shared web-based database that centralized all program requirements—from room dimensions to lighting power densities to occupancy schedules—allowing both firms to access and update information simultaneously.

A custom application translated the architectural model’s geometry into energy simulation inputs automatically, maintaining all spatial relationships and adjacencies. When design changes occurred the workflow could regenerate a complete energy model without requiring the hours of manual rebuilding required in traditional methods. This meant the design team could test energy performance iteratively throughout the design process rather than waiting for milestone reviews.

The workflow also reversed typical building organization conventions: placing circulation at the building perimeter and classrooms in the center provided natural light to corridors while giving students and faculty inspiring city views. The energy model could rapidly evaluate how this unconventional layout affected heating, cooling, and lighting loads, providing quantitative evidence for design decisions.

Perhaps most importantly, this collaborative framework allowed architects to participate directly in defining and reviewing energy model assumptions, elevating the entire team’s understanding of building performance. Rather than treating energy analysis as a separate compliance exercise, it became an integrated part of the design conversation.

For additional information, please see our conference paper.

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In addition to using cleaner energy, the building’s design itself minimizes its carbon footprint. The transparent facade and its use of glare-reducing strategies, for example, lower energy requirements by allowing the building to rely primarily on natural light during the day. Similarly, the Paulson Center’s series of green roofs and outdoor terraces naturally cool the building and its surrounding landscape while also helping to manage rainwater runoff. In addition to creating valuable outdoor green space that will serve as a kind of elevated campus quad, these roofs and terraces are an attractive amenity for the building’s neighbors who are able to view the landscape from above.

By bringing together an eclectic mix of spaces into a single building designed to encourage connections and community engagement, the Paulson Center builds a multidisciplinary community that will define the University’s creative and academic diversity.

For more information about the Paulson Center including interviews with the design team, visit NYU’s Paulson Center website. You can access the Project Press Kit here.