A rendering of Robert A. M. Stern’s North Instructional Building and Library

Even some of the most committed architecture buffs in New York, the sort who would travel around the world to see the Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House or Oscar Niemeyer’s Cathedral of Brasilia, will never make it up to Bronx Community College, at 2155 University Avenue. And yet, acre per acre, it is one of the most important architectural nurseries on the East Coast, if not beyond.

Once the home of New York University, its original master plan was conceived, with characteristic Gilded Age classicism, by Stanford White in 1892 and on a scale nearly as ambitious as the master plan devised by his partner Charles Follen McKim for Columbia University in Morningside Heights. Overlooking the Harlem River, it contains two of White’s masterpieces, the Gould Memorial Library (completed in 1899) with its splendid dome, and the open-air colonnade of his Hall of Fame for Great Americans, from 1912. [more]