Archinect - News

Cornell Tech celebrates Roosevelt Island Campus phase one completion

2022-02-24T14:33:00-05:00

Cornell Tech, Cornell University’s urban campus for technology research and education, has announced the completion of the first phase of its Roosevelt Island campus development in New York City. This news comes following the recent completion and opening of the Snøhetta-designed Verizon Executive Education Center and the Graduate Roosevelt Island Hotel in 2021.

The first three buildings at Cornell Tech, which opened in September 2017 include the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center, designed by Morphosis Architects, the TATA Innovation Center, designed by Weiss/Manfredi, and The House, designed by Handel Architects and developed by The Hudson Companies and Related Companies.

Previously on Archinect: Snøhetta completes two new buildings for Cornell Tech campus in New York

The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center is the campus’s first academic building offering a variety of spaces designed to support different learning modes, while incorporating advanced sustainability features and comm...

Snøhetta completes two new buildings for Cornell Tech campus in New York

2021-12-15T15:22:00-05:00

Construction has been completed at two Snøhetta-designed buildings for the Cornell Tech campus in New York. The two buildings, named the Graduate Roosevelt Island Hotel and the Verizon Executive Education Center, operate independently though physically connected by a planted entry plaza.

Image: Michael Grimm

Designed to be a “welcoming front door” to the Cornell Tech campus, the buildings will host academic conferences, classes, and programs, as well as lodging and dining outlets for guests and visitors.

Image: Michael Grimm

The 18-story, 196-room hotel tower features a façade with softly curved surfaces wrapped in double-height aluminum panels. At the ground level, a pair of V-shaped columns define the entrance to a bar opening onto the shared courtyard. A continuous soffit runs from this entrance along the perimeter of the ground floor, and ultimately to the education center.

Image: Michael Grimm

The education center, meanwhile, rises four stories, adopting an “intimate, orga...

Faculty members from Cornell's architecture department develop virtual reality program for popular video game company Epic Games

2019-06-27T13:56:00-04:00

Faculty in the Department of Architecture have received a cash gift from Epic Games Inc. in support of their work on Virtual Places, a project that is adapting the company's virtual reality (VR) gaming engine, Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), for architectural and urban design.

Three Cornell professors used virtual reality to create and expand on their research project Virtual Places. The study of architecture and video games is a growing focus. Within academia and practice, VR is a tool which helps unpack architectural ideas for learning as well as creating visualization possibilities for clients. Epic Games Inc., a video game and software development company known for creating the popular online game Fortnite, selected Professor Henry Richardson, Assistant Professor Timur Dogan, and Assistant Professor of the Practice Martin Miller as winners of a cash prize out of a pool of invited finalists for the international competition.

Image of Rockerfeller Center - taken from Virtual Places: Real Time Experiential Design and Visualization of Urban Spaces. Image courtesy of Cornell AAP

According to Richardson, "Virtual Places was launched this spring with a research seminar called Gaming Architecture. Both upper-class undergraduates and graduate students 'stress t...

Morphosis' new Bloomberg Center at Cornell Tech campus now open

2017-09-13T19:58:00-04:00

Morphosis' Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center in Roosevelt Island, New York has officially opened its doors. Designed as Cornell Tech's “home base”, the academic building was named in honor of Emma and Georgina Bloomberg, in recognition of a $100 million gift from former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

With Thom Mayne as design director and Morphosis principal Ung-Joo Scott Lee as project principal, the 4-story, 160,000 sq.ft. educational hub provides traditional classrooms and large workspaces as well as clusters of “break-out” spaces, huddle rooms, and social areas for group study sessions. Students can also use the quiet rooms and micro-pods for working privately or as telephone booths.

Interior. Photo: Matthew Carbone for Morphosis.

Ground floor. Photo: Matthew Carbone for Morphosis.

Aiming to be New York's first net-zero university building, the non-fossil fuel Bloomberg Center is equipped with multiple sustainable features, such as a 40,000 sq.ft. solar canopy that supports 1...

Snøhetta releases new images of its Graduate Hotel for the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island

2017-03-15T12:26:00-04:00

Cornell Tech has unveiled new details about its planned Graduate Hotel on its new Roosevelt Island campus. Developed by AJ Capital Partners, the hotel will offer 196 rooms alongside a restaurant, rooftop bar, and 5,200 square feet of flexible event space.

The hotel, which is designed by Snøhetta, will feature a “comfortable residential aesthetic” in line with its projected clientele—the families of students and visiting faculty. It will be located at the center of campus. The hotel is slated to open in 2019, while the rest of the three-phase campus masterplan isn’t expected to finish development until the early 2040’s.

Cornell Tech to build world's first Passive House high-rise on NY's Roosevelt Island

2015-06-12T18:20:00-04:00

Construction is slated to start this month on what-will-be the world's first high-rise residential tower built according to Passive House (PH) standards, considered the most rigorous criteria for reducing a building's greenhouse gas emissions. Passive houses, such as the building on the right in the thermogram below, release significantly less heat compared with a typical building (such as that on the left).

Touted as an "iconic marker" for Cornell University's new tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York's East River, the project will innovative design features such as:

A pre-fabricated metal façade that will act like a thermal blanket, insulating the structure.
A louver system, or the building's "gills," which will house the building's heating and cooling systems.
Low-VOC paint to limit off-gassing and improve air quality.
Exterior paint that "naturally shifts color from silver to warm champagne" when reflecting light.

According to figures released by the university, the building wil...