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
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