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.

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.

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.

The education center, meanwhile, rises four stories, adopting an “intimate, organic form” adjacent to the hotel. The building is wrapped in a system of vertical aluminum louvers clad in western red cedar, complementing the metallic panels of the hotel tower. Inside, the building holds a large, flexible banquet hall along with four multi-purpose classrooms with views of the campus and city.

The two buildings are connected by a central courtyard, while glass panels along the base of the buildings seek to form a connection between the internal and external elements. “Although each program and each client required a distinctive expression, the buildings ultimately work in partnership and are integrated within the larger Cornell Tech campus,” explained Michael Cotton, Director and Senior Architect at Snøhetta. 

“As we worked through the design, we found that creating a unified base wrapping a shared courtyard offered the best way to bring together the two projects while also providing a functional podium supporting the individual use of each building,” Cotton added.

The education center as well as the hotel façade was designed by Snøhetta. Stonehill Taylor served as the hotel’s architect of record, while interiors were designed by Graduate Hotels from Nashville, TN. The landscape component of the scheme we designed by Field Operations in partnership with Snøhetta.

News of the scheme comes one week after Snøhetta was announced as winner for a competition to design a downtown plaza in Helsinki, and one month after the firm revealed their completed “choreographed” observatory at One Vanderbilt in New York City.