ABSTRACT
The Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University makes for an imposing assertion of academic might, at once high-minded and stately. Its perimeter of tall, late-nineteenth-century buildings atop granite bases enclosing a showpiece white limestone porticoed library at their centre is viscerally entwined with the persona of the institution and its Ivy-League status. This, however, was not always the case. The story of the Morningside Heights campus is a tale of how an established, but not necessarily elite, institution engaged architecture and master planning as a tool in realising its national ambitions.
