Can photovoltaics ever be romantic? Morphosis Architects’ design for a new academic building for the Cornell NYC Tech campus, scheduled to open on Roosevelt Island in 2017, suggests the answer could be yes. The in-progress scheme lofts a “lilypad” of photovoltaic cells five stories in the air, covering the roof of Morphosis’ building and bridging a pedestrian street to rest atop a co-location facility (an on-campus business incubator) to be designed by an architect yet to be chosen. By calling it the “lilypad,” Morphosis principal Thom Mayne is trying to get out ahead of the nickname curve, and to suggest that his massive array (a.k.a. “the solar farm”) is more an element of landscape than of architecture. The structure itself is to be the first net-zero building in New York City, fulfilling its own energy needs and acting as a living embodiment of the future of technology. At a recent briefing on the campus master plan, scheduled to begin the city approvals process this week, Mayne said that the array simply has to be that big to produce enough power—though the pad also seems a lot like an older brother’s headlock on to-be-announced Architect #2.
In Cornell’s plans, we can start to see a future campus forming along with the two universities’ (Cornell has partnered with Israel’s Technion University) entrepreneurial, multi-disciplinary graduate curriculum. The metaphors are vegetal, but the concepts are digital. Will this new campus be part of the city, an island destination, a model green neighborhood? Or, will this be Silicon Valley East, where commercial and educational buildings that appear transparent retreat behind an invisible security curtain? You can look, but you can’t touch—not without a badge.
In its current incarnation, the floors below the lilypad narrow toward the ground, making the whole thing look like a ship in drydock or, given Mayne’s metallic proclivities, a battlestar. Mayne mentions floating trays of landscape across the long western façade to emphasize the jump-cut between the island and Manhattan, the beauty of having your trees and your city, too. Upper floors will have research spaces with no private offices but a “huddle” (a miniature conference room) for every member of the faculty. Lower floors have student work spaces, classrooms, and public access. Mayne’s first New York building, the academic building for Cooper Union, at 41 Cooper Square, has the same top-heavy proportion and silvery outcurving sides, albeit crammed onto a tight urban block. That building’s most notable interior feature, a swaying set of steps intended both as circulation and social space, has also been adapted for Cornell. A five-story atrium cuts the short way across the long Cornell building, with flights of stairs rising up through its center. The atrium is on axis with Fifty-seventh Street, giving everyone a view down a Manhattan canyon.
If I seem to be laying the scenic metaphors on thick, that’s intentional. Mayne’s building is just one element in Phase I of a project with a twenty-five-year build out. He’s got the prime position in the northwest corner of the site, a short stroll from the tram and the F train. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is designing the master plan, and James Corner Field Operations (of High Line fame) the landscape architecture. As S.O.M. associate director Colin Koop described it, the ground comes first, as soon as the 1939 Goldwater Hospital buildings on the site are demolished. Phase I will include four buildings: Mayne’s academic ship, the co-location facility, a housing tower, and an executive-education center with a hotel, all located at the north end of the site. The southern end abuts Southpoint Park, which leads to the brand new Four Freedoms Park at the tip of the island.
S.O.M. has planned a central circulation spine—all pedestrian—running from north to south, with diagonal paths cutting off at angles, framing more Manhattan views and leading to a series of small parks. The design reads as a do-over to the gridded hardscape of the development at the north end of Roosevelt Island. The buildings here will be lower, all but the housing topping out at the lilypad’s five stories. When asked for the origin of all those angles (which seem made for Mayne’s architecture), Koop talks about the paths of desire people cut across parks, and the cinematic views one gets between buildings on the High Line. The buildings also hew to the center in order to get them up on the natural ridge, nineteen feet above sea level, in case of a five-hundred year flood—another case of letting nature take the lead in the design. Along that spine are sketched thick blue “activation” lines, ground-floor spaces intended for indoor-outdoor flow. The southern end of Mayne’s building is a double-height skylit café, open to the public, shaded by the pad, and adjacent to a lecture hall and exhibit gallery. “You’ve been to the Ace Hotel?” he asked me. “Their lobby is what this space is.”
And there it is. The obligatory Ace Hotel reference. Everyone loves the Ace Hotel lobby. It is what “third places” were always meant to be, with better coffee. But in Silicon Valley, they make their own Ace Hotels. Facebook built a Main Street on their campus, with bike repair, a coffee shop, and food trucks. They hired Roman & Williams, designers of the Ace Hotel lobby, to create their main cafeteria. It is urbane, but entirely private. I see plenty of other IRL Facebook elements in the Cornell plans, too: Morphosis’s program diagram is studded with the micro-kitchens and breakout spaces so popular in the Bay Area. The workspaces are rows of open desks, periodically interrupted by conference rooms of varying size. Mayne says it right before I think it: it’s just like Bloomberg LP’s New York headquarters, minus the dayglo colors, where snacks are free, privacy unknown, and the elevators all stop at the main floor so that you have to engage with your co-workers on your way to your desk. Bloomberg, like Facebook, is the spatial equivalent of prevailing dot-com theories of innovation, where chance encounters over snacks color-coded for health lead to the next Gmail. It may be true. But with great innovation comes great paranoia, and those chance encounters tend to be only with fellow employees, on a campus.
Facebook and Bloomberg employees at least have to leave and engage with the insecure world the rest of us call home. Private shuttle buses carry thousands from the South Bay to select stops in San Francisco each day, so it is possible to engage for only a matter of minutes, but that still seems like a crucial distinction. Cornell Tech students won’t even have that: Phase I includes student housing across the street from the Morphosis building. (I couldn’t help thinking, If these students are so smart, shouldn’t they be able to find their own apartment? Or build an app for that?)
Cornell’s team says that isolation won’t happen here. “We think the next generation of technology will happen in places like New York, dense urban environments, where technology can be brought to bear to solve the problems of everyday people,” says Dean Dan Huttenlocher. Cornell students will be taught computer science and engineering, and will receive some business education, but one day a week will be spent in the field, looking at startups, nonprofits, and participating in (Facebook!) hackathons. “Ideally, there is a two-way flow, with New York also coming into the campus,” said Huttenlocher. He sees Roosevelt Island as a place apart, with opportunity for reflection, but one actually very well connected to existing tech centers in Dumbo and Chelsea, and nascent ones in western Queens.
Meanwhile, for the untechnical, the campus offers intriguing possibilities. Will we take advantage? I’ve been on Roosevelt Island a number of times, and always seem to find myself in the single, L-shaped Starbucks with no hope of a seat. A large, light, seat-filled café would provide necessary shelter from the winds and a resting place after you have trekked south to Four Freedoms (S.O.M. also plans major improvements to the existing riverfront roads for walking and biking). Programmed correctly, the lecture hall and exhibition gallery could also be a draw. The idea of starting with the landscape, which I referenced in my critique of the Barclays Center, means that half of Cornell’s site will lie fallow for a number of years. S.O.M. rendered that southern half as a series of geometric fields, open spaces that could be summer picnic destinations in their own right—an alternative to the alternative that is already Governors Island. But will it be welcoming? Mayne’s track record for providing accessible and appealing urban spaces is mixed: the plaza outside his Federal Building in San Francisco is aggressively bare, and the diagonal columns at the base of the Cooper Building had to be fitted with spikes to ward off skateboarders. The central stair there, as here, will be tantalizingly off-limits to the public. Huttenlocher says all of the outdoor spaces will be public, and so will the café—as long as New Yorkers behave.
Best-case scenario: the Cornell NYC Tech campus gives Roosevelt Island the contemporary identity it has never had, and serves as a gateway (with public bathrooms) for the refurbished parks to its south. Its landscaped main street gains a restaurant and a bookstore and a market along with the café, the lecture hall, and the gallery, amenities that need to draw on more than the students, professors, and mentors to survive. There is traffic, pedestrian and bicycle traffic, along those roads and up and down the spine and going both ways on the F train. Students decide Roosevelt Island is too boring and move off campus. Businesses move on campus. Co-location also means co-working. And Cornell’s campus starts to look, feel, and act like a more contemporary, more sustainable version of an existing innovation incubator. A neighborhood we like to call Dumbo.
Illustration: Kilograph.
