Not every structure should shout for attention: there’s nothing wrong with a well-designed background building. Handel Architects’ latest project, The House at Cornell Tech, a $115 million residential tower on the new computer, information, and engineering-sciences campus on New York’s Roosevelt Island, could have been a fine example of this notion. Heralded for its pioneering energy-conserving strategies, its form—a shaft extruded from a roughly rectangular footprint—is straightforward, if plain. Its windows are slightly inset, giving the facade’s alternating bands of light and dark gray metal some depth. And this skin has other subtle refinements, including its expression as a wrapper, with a louvered vertical “reveal” that extends from the entrance almost to the roof.
There’s one problem, however: The House is too tall and too prominent for such a simple response. It sits at the northern end of the 12-acre campus, which could eventually include up to 2.1 million square feet of facilities, and it rises next to the picturesque trusswork of the Queensboro Bridge. The 26-story-tall, 273,000-square-foot building is highly visible from the Manhattan and Queens riverfronts, part of an ensemble with the far more sculptural—and low-rise—Cornell Tech facilities built so far: Morphosis’s four-story academic building and Weiss/Manfredi’s six-story “co-location” building. It is also significantly taller than the 17-story Snøhetta-designed hotel and executive education center under construction just to the west. Because of its height and placement it dominates its neighbors, but looks flat-footed in their company.
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