Touro University's new Manhattan Campus at 3 Times Square brings together nine graduate and undergraduate programs formerly located in several local schools across the city. The new vertical campus, located on eleven floors of 3 Times Square, houses classrooms, a library, lecture halls, laboratories, a large event space and other student lounge and amenity spaces. The first phase of the 300,000 gross square foot project was open for the start of the Fall 2023 school semester. The project reflects Touro’s strong belief in the value of in-person learning and meeting students where they are.
Touro University’s new Manhattan Campus at 3 Times Square brings together nine graduate and undergraduate programs formerly located in several local schools across the city. The new vertical campus, located on eleven floors of 3 Times Square, houses classrooms, a library, lecture halls, laboratories, a large event space and other student lounge and amenity spaces. The first phase of the 300,000 gross square foot project was open for the start of the Fall 2023 school semester. The project reflects Touro’s strong belief in the value of in-person learning and meeting students where they are.
Located in the heart of Times Square, Touro’s new consolidated campus features a dedicated entrance lobby at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 43rd Street. The designers wanted to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity the Times Square location offered the school to present themselves to the public and communicate the school’s many academic offerings. The design challenge for the lobby was to create a strong presence on Times Square while providing a restrained, dignified image for an institution of higher education.
To maximize the impact, we first expanded the exposure from the street by demolishing a mechanical mezzanine level, raising the ceiling, and increasing the height of the exterior glazing. The design includes a new entrance and entry canopy, and new elevators to bring students up to the second floor where they transfer to the tower elevator core that services floors 2-11. A large opening in the second-floor slab smooths that connection and provides a dramatic 38-foot high space. A stair to the second floor is designed as a ribbon to encourage a view up with hung structural rods accentuating the verticality of the space.
To compete with the vibrancy of the context, where animated LED signs skin the outside every building, our strategy was to brightly light the interior space so that attention is focused on the interior volume of space. A super graphic was created with linear bands of light. The fixtures face a matte-white wall and its reflected light fills the lobby with luminosity. Instead of conveying the college identity with intense illumination set behind a luminous surface, the name Touro is demarcated with the absence of light. The word “TOURO” is in complete shadow. In order to not be upstaged by Times Square’s attention seeking media, The vertical illuminance of the reflected light at one foot from the feature wall is at a very high level of well over 100 foot-candles. This quantity of light diminishes as one steps further from the wall. The high contrast ratio of a static brightly illuminated white wall in combination with the dark shadows of the lettering makes the interior lobby plainly visible from afar. In fact, the lack of animation figures prominently when seen in conjunction with the ever-moving media of Times Square.