“Google didn’t exist 25 years ago, Facebook didn’t exist 25 years ago, even AOL didn’t exist 25 years ago,” Cornell's Andrew Winters said recently. “The challenge is how do you create a tech campus today that is still flexible enough to grow and evolve for the next 25 years?” — New York Observer
Cornell unveiled its plans for a brand new 12.5-acre tech campus on Roosevelt Island today. The master plan is by SOM and Field Operations, the first academic building is by Thom Mayne and includes a giant two-acre solar array meant to help the structure achieve net-zero energy consumption.
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So they would have us believe that a great center of future technological innovation will look like a standard tower-in-the-park development with a few curves thrown in, and an atrium borrowed from John Portman?
I like how these renderings give you absolutely no idea of what the building actually looks or feels like.
As @plewke pointed out on Twitter, a more accurate headline would have been "Cornell Unveils New NYC Tech Campus by SOM & Field Operations, with a building by Morphosis"
yea, this set of images is really uninformative.
cornell is trying to recreate MIT's medialab in NYC - on an island - by making a fancy new campus - BEFORE they've even established the program? seems more like a race for money and shiny new things with a bunch of half-baked ideas.
The city is making such a huge deal about this - but it seems like it's primarily being used as a marketing ploy to sell NYC as a new tech hub or something. look! we have a shiny new tech building! we're tech! creative class™ move here! I dunno - maybe it'll work and be a successful program, but I feel like there needs to be other conditions in place to encourage R&D start-up culture to flourish instead of just handing out money to universities.
I agree that the buildings are a bit of a let-down, but this is a really good thing for nyc.
Graduate-level tech research needs to happen in the city.
right - I agree that NYC's economy would benefit from more local tech research- but it needs to start from within the institutions rather than just being handed a site and a bunch of cash from the bloomberg admin. the fact that the other institutions in the running backed out makes me think something's amiss...
of course we all don't really care because some of us will just collect some money and walk away and the rest of us will have some pretty renderings and a few interesting buildings to ogle for a while. but if the goal was to create a program focused on innovation and research, it seems like there's a bit of putting the cart before the horse. why not build up the program for a few years working out some of the kinks before deciding what facilities you really need? just reading the website for the program it's really vague and filled with jargon. If I were a highly talented graduate student interested in bleeding edge research, I'd be far more interested in working with specific people on specific projects in an established program. right now it sounds like they're planning on training tech production labor - code monkeys.
it feels like cornell is only really using this to expand its enterprise/brand and make some money.
Columbia and NYU have been building from within and it's not enough.
At this point it is still kind of vague because program-specific functions have taken a back seat to the environmental technology framework of the campus.
From what I read a while back, the Cornell/Technion meetup was love at first sight. Controversial maybe, but I think the combo is better than Stanford/CUNY. Plus Cornell has its medical school right across in Manhattan.
The faculty are pretty good, and with Google on board, this is not going to be a place for code-monkeying, despite whatever earth shattering innovation is missing from the design.
how come architects are their worst critique? and what happened to constructive criticism or is that a thing of the past.
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