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, the partner 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.
Have you experienced business or university campus designs like this? Does it make a difference?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2015, @05:12PM
University of Washington simply put zero classrooms in its computer science and engineering building. I could make marketing style claims about how having all our classes is buildings belonging to other departments is going to synergize all the things, but lets be honest: walking down a path or hall near people you don't know when going to class does not make you interact with them. Maybe its just the Seattle culture....