WEISS/MANFREDI broke ground yesterday on Cornell Tech's pioneering building, "The Bridge." Spearheading the first phase of the $2 billion Roosevelt Island tech campus, the new building will "bridge" the gap between academia and industry, providing a seven-story "corporate co-location" loft where students and industry leaders will collaborate.
“The Bridge is a crystalline incubator with river-to-river views and creates a three-dimensional crossroads, an ecosystem of innovation to catalyze collaboration between academics and entrepreneurs,” say design partners Marion Weiss and Michael A. Manfredi.
Cornell University Student's inflatable pavilion, the result of Lorena Del Río's "A Journey Into Plastics" seminar. Image Courtesy of Lorena Del Río / Cornell University Department of Architecture
It's graduation time. As universities around the globe - or at least most in the Northern hemisphere, where over 80% of the world's universities are located - come to the end of the academic year, many university architecture studios have recently closed out the construction of pavilions, installations and other small educational projects. At ArchDaily, we've already received a number of submissions from students and professors who would like to see their studio's work reach a larger audience, such as the example above from Cornell University's "A Journey Into Plastics" seminar, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's studio project completed with the assistance of Marcus Prizewinner Sou Fujimoto (more on that project here). But we're interested in doing something more.
Cornell University professor and historian Mary Woods is one of over 30 influential practitioners that was interviewed during the filming of Arbuckle Industries’ Archiculture documentary. Beyond her explanation of “Roarkism,” a term inspired by Ayn Rand’s protagonist Howard Roark in The Fountainhead that is used to describe the architect as an “uncompromising individualist,” Woods explains the market-driven nature of the profession and how the US government has historically been reluctant to embrace the arts and architecture.
DesignIntelligence has released their 2015 rankings of the Best US Architecture Schools for both undergraduate and graduate programs. Over 1,400 professional practice organizations were surveyed and asked to respond to the question: “In your firm’s hiring experience in the past five years, which of the following schools are best preparing students for success in the profession?” In addition, more than 3,800 architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, and industrial design students were also surveyed about their education, in data presented separately from the rankings.
However, perhaps more enlightening than the ranking itself are the firms' responses to several additional issues raised in the report. For example, 54.6% of the firms surveyed selected sustainability and climate change as the professions’ biggest concern, while maintaining design quality was a close second. Firms also provided insights on the most important qualities of new graduates entering the workplace, with an overwhelming 70.1% selecting attitude/personality as the most important attribute.
Read on after the break for the Top 10 undergraduate and graduate programs.
Kunlé Adeyemi, the 38 year-old former disciple of Rem Koolhaas, made headlines last year with his Makoko Floating School, which enabled better access to education a slum community in Lagos. In this profile of Adeyemi and his Practice NLÉ Architects, originally published by Metropolis Magazine, Avinash Rajagopal explores what drives the young architect, explaining why he was selected as one of 10 designers in Metropolis Magazine's 2014 New Talent list.
When the Makoko Floating School was completed in March 2013, it received wildly enthusiastic critical acclaim from the international news media. The simple A-frame structure, buoyed by recycled plastic barrels in a lagoon in Lagos, Nigeria, was designed by NLÉ, a Lagos- and Amsterdam-based studio founded by the architect Kunlé Adeyemi. The project, intended as a model for how Lagos’s floating community could build simple, sustainable structures for themselves, subsequently faced a few challenges. One of the biggest was winning over local officials, who simply did not know what to make of such a building.
Consisting of over 2,800 iPod Nano screens, "The Discovery Wall" at Cornell's Medical College in Manhattan was a 2.5 year long process in digital art, conceived by Squint/Opera and accomplished in collaboration with Hirsch & Mann. From a distance, the animated screen appears as a single, unified image. But take a closer look and every single screen has its own unique text. As a permanent piece, it shows the plausibility of digital art to integrate with the existing building fabric. Watch the video above and make sure to learn more about the creative process here.
Taking place at the Hartell Galley at Cornell University, 'Vers un climat: Building (with) the Unstable' is an exhibition by AWP Architects focusing on the nocturnal face of architecture - how buildings contribute to the urban nightscape. From August 26 - September 16, the exhibit features both realized and proposed projects by AWP while revealing the practice’s in depth research on the many ways in which the intangible dimensions of architecture – such as atmosphere, climate, and light - materialize in buildings. Part of AWP ’s ongoing challengeis to translate recurrent themes of impermanence, evolution, and the uncontrollable into design. More architects' description after the break.
City Council has approved Cornell’s two-million-square-foot tech campus planned to break ground in 2014 on New York’s Roosevelt Island. Masterplanned by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), the ambitious carbon positive campus will offer housing for 2,000 full-time graduate students, world-class education facilities, a hotel, a corporate co-location building, and more than an acre of public open space. Construction will commence with the first, state-of-the-art academic building that will be designed by Thom Mayne, founder ofMorphosis, who will incorporate the latest environmental advances, such as geothermal and solar power, to achieve net-zero energy for the landmark structure.
Today, Cornell University has announced their selection of Thom Mayne and Morphosis to design the first academic building for the CornellNYC Tech campus on Roosevelt Island. Mayor Michael Bloomberg awarded the Roosevelt Island campus project to Cornell mid-December of last year. With plans to achieve net-zero, the campus is striving to become the new modern prototype for learning spaces worldwide.
“This project represents an extraordinary opportunity to explore the intersection of three territories: environmental performance, rethinking the academic workspace and the unique urban condition of Roosevelt Island,” Mayne said, as reported by Cornell University. “This nexus offers tremendous opportunities not only for CornellNYC Tech, but also for New York City.”
After Mayor Bloomberg, Cornell President Skorton and Technion President Lavie announced Cornell’s victory over Stanford to build an eleven acre state-of-the-art tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City, the team has now tackled their next step in choosing six high-profile architecture firms competing to design the schools first academic facility.
Informality, which was first categorized and described in the 1970s, is now pervasive — across cities, in the places we live, work, and move through the everyday. For many, the informal is no longer a discrete sector appended to the workings of the “formal” city, but an integral effect of the structuring of cities and landscapes by contemporary economic, political, and technological change. Self-built architectures and urban agglomerations, ambivalent landscapes, nomadic and temporal spatial manifestations of informalized are situationally specific, but globally ubiquitous. Design Tactics and the Informalized City symposium, being put on by Cornell University on April 13-14, brings a discussion of this reality to disciplines that work on the city in material and spatial terms: architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, engineering, media and product design. More information on the event after the break.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is set to announce Cornell University and its partner, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, winner of the intense, yearlong competition to build a New York City Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island. The announcement follows Stanford University’s unexpected withdraw from the competition after tense negotiations with the Bloomberg administration. Meanwhile, last Friday Cornell received a $350 million donation in support of their proposal, being the largest gift the University has ever received.
Just recently, the author of architectural videos blog shared with us a video on OMA’s founding partner Rem Koolhaas‘ lecture which he gave at Cornell University on October 20th. His lecture was given on the occasion of opening Milstein Hall, the new extension to the faculty of Architecture, Art and Planning designed by OMA.
Architectural Digest has compiled a list of college campuses throughout the United States which have the most remarkable architectural traditions, which broadcast their innovative philosophy through design. A number of colleges have fully incorporated modern architecture into their campus schemes, for example MIT; while others have preserved their historical edifices through the course of the years, like the University of Virginia. The list involves some prestigious institutions, in addition to some surprises, all possessing their individual architectural languages.
See the 10 College Campuses with the Best Architecture after the break.
