Oculus - Winter 2015 - (Page 18)

©WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism feature ICE in the River: A Cornell Tech's Center of Connectivity Cornell's new academic-corporate incubator on Roosevelt Island is designed to embrace the ideas/ culture/education economy - and help integrate the island into the city B Y Bi LL m iLLA r d 18 Oculus Winter 2015 cademia has conventionally been a place apart from commerce, structured to keep learning and research free from market pressures. Yet information science, woven into nearly every aspect of daily life, increasingly requires application rather than abstraction. Accordingly, the new Cornell Tech campus turns to a part of New York that's passed through dystopian and utopian phases, bolstering its potential for connectivity while maintaining its distinctness. The Bridge at Cornell Tech, WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism's colocation building for incubating infotech businesses close to academic talent, bonds a historically complex site to the economic sector of the future. From the 1820s through the 1960s, Roosevelt Island was where the city offshored its poverty, illness, insanity, and crime. It hosted institutions: hospitals, prisons, the infamous lunatic asylum. Philip Johnson and John Burgee gave it a Mid-century-Modernist master plan (published in 1969 as The Island Nobody Knows), creating a bedroom community of Josep Lluis Sert and John M. Johansen buildings, linked by an ambling Main Street: a walkable, quirky Brutalist district with qualities commanding strong loyalties, especially affordability, despite physical isolation and limited shopping. In recent years, market-rate development has reached the island and altered its demographics. As Roosevelt Island Historical Society President Judith Berdy wrote last spring, it's "a microcosm of New York and the country packed into two miles." Now the island's southern end is morphing into a campus-centered neighborhood, as Cornell develops a new program combining graduate education, research, and close interaction with industry. Cornell Tech is the official name for an infotech consortium currently operating out of Google's Chelsea headquarters, moving to the island in 2017. The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology serves as an academic partner (the first students receive dual Reinventing Architecture: Design in a Digital World

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Oculus - Winter 2015

First Words Letter from Two Presidents
Letter from the Editor
Center for Architecture
One Block Over
Opener: Practical Attitudes
ICE in the River: Cornell Tech’s Center of Connectivity
Restoring – At Least Virtually – One of England’s Greatest Lost Buildings
At the Corner of Past and Present
The Design-Fabrication Dynamic
How Big Data is Reshaping Architecture
Architecture at the Digital Edge
3D for the Defense
Thinking Beyond the Flat Page
In Print
51-Year Watch
Last Words
Index to Advertisers

Oculus - Winter 2015