A new 400,000-square-foot climate campus scheme for New York City’s Governors Island has been unveiled by SOM and Mayor Eric Adams at the close of a two-year competitive bids process for a project that is expected to support cutting-edge environmental research while creating green jobs and educational opportunities for future generations.
Stony Brook University is leading the New York City Exchange development, which will also add $1 billion in economic benefits to the city. The university will partner with a list of 15 schools and organizations, including IBM, Georgia Tech, and Oxford University, and offer space to 30 other entities from the non-profit sector, all with expertise that touches on the development’s core program areas of environmental justice, water rights, workforce development, education, and labor.
SOM will create several new classrooms, laboratory facilities, student residences, and other academic structures as part of the project while also working to overhaul the existing Liggett Hall and Fort Jay Theater. A total of 4.5 acres of open space will be added as part of the construction. Buildings at the Exchange will be all-electric and feature some of the first commercial mass timber designs in New York City history.
SOM's design partner Colin Koop said: “It is a tremendous honor to design a new kind of campus: One that not only sets the stage for our post-carbon world but also centers a compelling new public realm for all New Yorkers. Our design embodies this stewardship by weaving sinuous mass timber pavilions through the rolling landscape of the park and reusing the historic building fabric of Governors Island. Together, these spaces will cultivate advances in climate research and pilot new technologies that can be deployed across the city and eventually the world.”
The consortium behind the project is still raising funds for the endeavor, supported by previously allocated capital funding and monies from both the Simons Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Costs are estimated at around $700 million. Plans are for Phase 1’s construction to begin in 2025, with the Exchange’s first facilities becoming fully operational in time for 2028.
8 Comments
What am I even looking at?
Its called FLUFF
There is lots of empty commercial space in Manhattan right now. Hard to believe that some of that inventory could not be repurposed to for this facility.
The notion of building a research center on Governor's Island is not totally unreasonable to me, but I'd have liked to see a scheme focused on minimal footprint. Perhaps a typology in the vain of Larrabee Barnes' Haystack Mountain School in Maine - a compact campus of a few lab buildings and research halls set on pilotis...
Any elements of the program that don't explicitly need to be on the island - admin, generic classroom space, probably student/faculty residence - should have been an adaptive reuse in nearby Lower Manhattan, which currently has several large commercial buildings sitting vacant. You can get to GI from Wall Street in about 20 minutes with the existing ferry service.
I guess it's asking too much to expect an environmental research center to be environmentally responsible.
Hey, if they really believed that sea levels would rise in the co
*coming decade why would they invest 700 mil to build on an island…
Wouldn’t it be more impactful if the exhibit was more of a glorified sea wall with a path along it with exhibits and whatnot…
This looks like Generic Timber 101 that both Euro starchitects and American acronyms have been pumping out for the past decade.
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