Dive Brief:

• A 14-story, $77 million medical school building that will incorporate simulations to teach doctors their profession as well as lecture and lab spaces is the crown jewel of a transformation process that Columbia University has been carrying out on its medical campus in northern Manhattan's Washington heights neighborhood in New York City.
• The school broke ground for the 100,000-square-foot building last fall, while a new building for the School of Nursing gets going later this year and renovations and improvements to 500,000 square feet of existing buildings have been underway since 2006.
• Columbia says its goal is to transform the 20-acre campus above the Hudson River into a state-of-the-art education center that will be in today's world what Columbia was to medical training when the campus was created in the 1920s.

Dive Insight:

Architect Elizabeth Diller, whose firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the glass-faced medical school, says it will be a visible "hive of activity" giving soon-to-be doctors opportunities to practice on high-tech equipment and participate in simulations designed to teach them real-world decision-making as well as medical knowledge.