Lee Bollinger, Columbia University’s Invisible Man

Bollinger was the man in charge of Manhattan’s largest landowner, as well as principal shaper of the political and moral priorities of a national elite he helped lead. Few people consciously thought of him in these grandiose terms, but the occlusion of power is built into the architecture at Columbia. The university’s campus is designed as a miniature acropolis walled off from Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, with a colonnaded classical temple crowning a vast symmetrical plaza of terraces and stairways. Until 1934, Low Library was the institute’s center of learning, towering somewhere near the geographic midpoint and elevational apex of campus.