The Columbia is a 36-story, 400,000 square foot residential tower dating from 1980 and is the architect’s first building designed in New York City. It sits at the major intersection of the two wide streets, West 96th Street and Broadway. Foreshadowing later contextualism, the building's strong15-story street wall allows it to blend in with the built fabric of15-story buildings along Broadway. Simultaneously, strong overlapping at the corners of the residential tower’s balconies helps to create its scale. A vertical elevator shaft unifies the tower and the lower street walls design elements. The residential lobby placed along West 96th Street provides access to the tower, which contains 320 residences.

The Columbia design features one, two, and three bedroom units, which range in size from 600 square feet to 1,800 square feet. In addition, the building houses meeting rooms as well as a health complex that includes an Olympic size swimming pool, squash courts and exercise rooms on the 14th floor for all of the residents. The retail space along Broadway can accommodate two-story shops and restaurants and cars can enter and exit the building’s garage along 97th Street.

The Columbia is a late Modernist work that invokes the modularity of that movement with results that are very different indeed from the more contextual design approach in many of our subsequent architectural designs. The energetic treatment of the façade is partially inspired by the so-called Brutalist trends that were still very much current at the beginning of the Eighties. The influence of that movement is most evident in the treatment of the cantilevered balconies.