Take the F train to Roosevelt Island and you'll find yourself on an island in the East River, sandwiched between midtown Manhattan and Queens. Its seclusion and history as an enclave of middle-class families in an absurdly expensive city gives it a small-town feel. People use words like lost, suburban, and eerily quiet to describe the place.
That's about to change.
Bustling, youthful, and collegiate will more aptly describe the island now that Cornell Tech is building a campus there. The school, a joint venture between Cornell University and Technion University, broke ground earlier this year, launching a development plan that the school (and the city) sees elevating New York’s status as a major player in tech.
The designers envision a campus of shiny, modern buildings on a verdant strip of land stretching about a mile from the Queensboro bridge to Southpoint Park. The first four buildings will be completed within two years, but work will continue through 2043. New York architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill developed the master plan, which so far includes the Bloomberg Center, a zero net energy building designed by Thomas Mayne of Morphosis; a glassy co-location building called the Bridge designed by Weiss/Manfredi Architecture; a 26-story residential tower from Handel Architects; and a conference center and landscaping by James Corner of Field Operations. A pathway called the Spine ties it all together, with smaller sidewalks that direct people toward a central plaza.
Despite its name, the East River is an estuary that rises and falls with the tide. That meant designing everything around a specific elevation. Colin Koop, an associate director at SOM who is leading the project, says the island's natural ridge encouraged designing a path that led toward the center. “It’s been calibrated so all the sidewalks and pathways bring everybody from the edge of the site diagonally up to the center and naturally spill them back down into the sidewalks and promenades of the island,” he says. Every building faces the center of the island, creating a centralized hub that will foster spontaneous and serendipitous meetings of people from various disciplines and departments as they walk around the campus.
Designing “collision points,” or moments where individuals come together in spontaneous interactions, has long been a trendy idea. MIT’s famed Building 20 and the Pixar campus near San Francisco are two places designed to promote "crossing paths.” It's happening on a slightly bigger scale on Roosevelt Island.
“Those principles can work on an urban scale,” Koop says.
This aligns with Cornell Tech’s overarching goal of building a "graduate school for the digital age," says school dean Dan Huttenlocher. In such a world, collaboration and cooperation are essential to success. Students coming out of Cornell Tech should know how to code, yes, but so too should they be able to talk to a media manager or collaborate with environmental scientists.
This interdisciplinary ethos is echoed most clearly in Weiss/Manfredi’s Bridge, where students and companies will co-exist like dorm mates. The structure has an almost hourglass shape: Two glassy wings are connected by a transparent atrium. The architects, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, believe this central location, a place to grab coffee and relax, will be a collision point between industry professionals and students. “The idea is to get people into a kind of close proximity, so you can get these catalytic connections between different disciplines,” Manfredi says. “It’s about making connections between someone who might be working at Microsoft and some doctoral student who is working on ways of assembling information, and that rarely happens on an academic campus.”
The two wings cantilever from the atrium to provide a peripheral view, which Weiss says is vital to creating a setting in which inhabitants feel they can take stock in what’s happening around them. At the same time, the structure’s shape allows for eight corners instead of four, doubling the available nooks that can be used as a company's personal space. “Even a small startup company can feel like they’re not just swallowed up in this large mass of square footage,” she says. “That they have a little bit of an identity.”
This same idea of connectivity is seen in the Bloomberg Center, with its five floors of open laboratories and workspaces. Its entrance aligns with 57th Street in Manhattan, providing a clear line of site between the island and the mainland. Meanwhile, its interior is open and inviting, ditching offices in favor of “huddle spaces” that are available for all to use.
Andrew Winters, Cornell Tech's director of capital projects and planning, says private offices consume valuable space and require a lot of energy to heat and cool. The Bloomberg Center is designed to be zero net energy building, generating its own energy. It is low and long, maximizing the surface area available for rooftop photovoltaic panels. Eventually, students will use data gleaned from the building's sensors and systems to optimize the amount of energy produced and consumed. “We’re treating the building like a living experiment,” Winters says.
In Huttenlocher’s view, the campus’s architecture is a direct result of the program’s ambitions. “A big piece of what’s driving us and almost everything we’re doing is the urban context---the notion of an educational experience that throws all kind of different people together on a daily basis,” he says.
New York and New Yorkers pride themselves on an ability to interact with people from almost any background. At Cornell Tech, this means students from divergent backgrounds and academic programs will interact with the city’s many pockets of industry. The school currently offers a master's in computer science; a tech-focused MBA; a two-year program in connective media; and a data-centric program called Healthier Life that focuses on the health sector. “We try to be very disciplined in not thinking about technology as a sector,” says Kyle Kimball, president of the city's Economic Development Corporation. “If you think of NYC econ as a set of verticals of traditional industry, we don’t think of tech as just another vertical but rather something that transcends all industries in the city.”
As such, the students are being prepped for a job market that looks quite a bit different than what they might find in a city like Palo Alto. Make all the comparisons to Silicon Valley you like, but most anyone at Cornell Tech will tell you New York isn't interested in being the new Silicon Valley. Cornell Tech’s campus is an attempt to physically embody those distinctions. Still, using architecture as a way to spur behavior is only part of the equation. There’s the curriculum, the teachers, and the industry tenants to come who will play a role in Cornell Tech’s impact.
Regardless of how the school's plans play out, the campus will at the least be a spectacular place to watch a sunset. “Having river views in New York is a luxury," Winters says. "Having two river views? No one has two river views.”
