Durst Gift Helps Launch New Center on Urban Real Estate

Vishaan Chakrabarti, Carole Ann Fabian and Helena Durst talk about the Durst gift and the new Center for Urban Real Estate. Without real estate, there could be no architecture, no planning, no preservation. Now the graduate school devoted to all those things has launched the University's first Center for Urban Real Estate , a research group whose mission is to identify solutions for a rapidly urbanizing world. The center is led by Vishaan Chakrabarti , an architect, former city planner and real estate developer, who joined Columbia in 2009 as the Holliday Professor of Real Estate Development and director of the real estate development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. This photograph of the Empire State Building under construction in 1930 is among the books, architectural renderings and plans that make up the Old York Library Collection. Chakrabarti's ambitious goals for the center, established last fall, got a big boost recently when one of New York's leading real estate families, the Durst Organization, announced a $4 million gift to GSAPP and Columbia Libraries ' Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. A quarter of the gift establishes the Durst Fund for Research, which will support research and programming in the real estate development program.