The first academic building at Cornell Tech, the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center, is a gleaming, bold statement on the new island campus for Cornell Tech, a partnership of Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Its muscular, athletic stance, where a solar roof of 1,464 photovoltaic (PV) panels is boosted above four stories of teaching spaces, exultantly declares we have arrived about this adventurous step in bringing digital education and entrepreneurship together. Yet Thom Mayne, the design director and founder of Morphosis Architects, a Los Angeles– and New York–based firm, brushes off the implication that an arresting expression was intentional for this graduate computer-science and engineering facility. “I don’t design icons,” he says without irony—even though academic buildings by Morphosis such as Gates Hall at Cornell’s Ithaca, New York, campus, or Emerson College in L.A. do stand out forcefully from the crowd.