Gates Global Aims Played Down in Design of $500 Million Campus

December 29, 2011, 4:06 AM EST By Bloomberg

Review by James S. Russell

Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) -- An aerodynamically curved building wing zooms over the entrance court at the new $500 million campus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. Such future-focused imagery suggests an aggressive corporation on the move. Bill Gates, the Microsoft Corp. founder, and his wife, Melinda, pursue their philanthropic goals with the same impatient fervor that he brought to achieving world domination by Windows. With $33.5 billion in assets (which is growing quickly through gifts from Warren Buffett), the foundation aims to transform global health, agriculture and education.

By contrast, the 900,000-square-foot campus located near the foot of the Space Needle north of downtown seems designed to play down the urgency and breadth of that mission. The Seattle- based architecture firm on NBBJ supplies a generic glass-and- metal corporate niceness with comforting wood floors and neutral carpeting. From the street, it looks like a standard-spec office building.

The lofty glassy lobby overlooks an alluring plaza that unites two six-story boomerang-shaped buildings with lush plantings heavy on native ferns and ponds spanned by wooden bridges. The ponds, designed by landscape architect Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd., store rain runoff to water plants in dry months. Cool underground water storage reduces power demand for air-conditioning.

Sharing Ideas

I strolled down sun-filled corridors that run along the tightly curved inside face of the buildings. Lined by small meeting spaces and lounges, these hallways subtly encourage people to stop and share ideas. Coffee and snack areas are organized around spacious stairways showered in daylight at the apex of the boomerangs, so that people trying to end AIDS will cross paths with education reformers.

Most people work near a window because the buildings’ profiles are narrow, and the light quality is superb compared to your average cubicle farm. Gates people call this “daylight equity.” It also saves lighting energy.

From a high balcony I gazed into a huge space that serves as a cafeteria and “civic room,” as NBBJ managing partner Steve McConnell calls it, because it also hosts large meetings of grantees and other global partners. Receptions spill outside to the lush plaza. In addition, there’s a large conference center.

The planned and informal socializing aspires to lead to eureka moments. Too bad they feel ticked off a checklist rather than exuding engagement with the necessary passion and urgency.

Default to Blandness

Artifacts from many countries hang on the wall and strategically placed screens play videos of work being done, but they are background ambience, not front and center. The place is almost aggressively impersonal, as if any meaningful architectural gesture might offend someone or be read as colonialist bullying.

A visitor center will open next year, but it’s conceived as a museum, and may feel like a defense against interested citizens rather than an invitation to them.

The default to blandness is a lost opportunity.

It put me in mind of Livestrong, Lance Armstrong Foundation, whose recently built home in Austin I had toured not long ago.

Founded by the bicycling champion, the organization supports people with cancer. The San Antonio architecture firm Lake/Flato remodeled an old metal warehouse, and bathed its cavernous interior with daylight from bands of windows built into the roof. Informally arranged cubicles flow around boxlike wooden structures enclosing conference spaces.

Joy of Giving

Touching testimonials from grateful partners and supporters -- heavily bicycle-themed -- clutter the place. The joy of giving and the connection to people served is palpable.

Livestrong offers conference space free to nonprofits around the city. In this way it builds community connections not only through its core mission but by mingling with other charitable organizations.

At 30,000 square feet, Livestrong is tiny compared to Gates, with a simpler mission focused on people in deep distress. Rather than fence off emotion, the foundation and its architecture invite it in, with the result that the place has a cheerful energy utterly invisible at the posh, sober Gates.

(James S. Russell writes on architecture for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Island Press has just published his book, “The Agile City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Jeffrey Burke, Manuela Hoelterhoff.

To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net. web.me.com/jscanlonrussell

To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

View the original article here

Cornell’s $2 Billion Campus Fuels N.Y.C. Search for Tech Jobs

December 20, 2011, 3:05 PM EST By James S. Russell

Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Broad sloping buildings roofed by solar panels and swaddled in plants that filter storm water will rise on an island in New York’s East River.

That’s Cornell University’s vision for a new applied- sciences campus in New York City. The school was named yesterday as the winner of a competition set up by the city to build a facility for job-spinning engineering research -- the way Stanford University has helped seed innovation in Silicon Valley.

The question now is whether the project will run counter to the trend for spinoff jobs to flee the city for suburbia.

Seven proposals involving 15 universities were considered. Cornell’s bid was bolstered by the announcement last week of an anonymous $350 million gift to the university for the project.

Cornell, based in Ithaca, New York, worked with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa on a $2 billion proposal for a 10-acre campus on Roosevelt Island. The city offered the site free, along with providing $100 million for infrastructure work.

The project could involve more than 2 million square feet for more than 2,000 students. The first 150,000-square-foot building would generate as much power as it would use.

In Cornell’s proposal, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, people move through multilevel interior courtyards lit by sun sliding between arrays of photovoltaic panels. The courtyards become places where engineers meet entrepreneurs and new media pioneers pitch budding venture capitalists.

Since the campus will be built over a number of years, it could be shaped less by the technology of labs and more by the collaborative necessity to bend very complex teams to daunting tasks. The campus also exemplifies how much “green” design has permeated the world of technology.

Uncertain Outlook

Beyond the campus, the economic upside for New York is far from clear. The city has proved congenial to small media startups and makers of applications, but can’t compete with the suburbs’ cheaper, horizontal space once a company’s growth requires more room.

New York City is a powerhouse of medical research, for example, but much of the spinoff wealth is created in drug labs and medical-device makers that dot New Jersey’s suburbs.

And yet the intensely urban and collaborative engineering scene in New York City suggests that tech must increasingly leave isolating suburban office parks behind.

“Software and applications need the kind of dense expertise that cities are full of,” said Seth W. Pinsky, president of the sponsoring New York City Economic Development Corporation in a telephone interview.

MIT, Harvard

High-tech companies that used to locate in office parks along route 128 in Boston’s suburbs now tighten bonds with MIT and Harvard by building large-scale labs in urban Cambridge. That’s the kind of linkage New York City wants to build with the major applied-sciences institution it doesn’t now have.

New York hopes that spinoffs create such a Cambridge-style future for gentrifying Long Island City, near Cornell’s planned location. Inevitably, the spinoff would likely benefit the region not just the city. That’s fine as long as suburbs share the costs (mainly in transportation improvements).

Stanford University and City College of New York floated a 1.9-million-square-foot Roosevelt Island proposal featuring a street hanging high in the air and dubbed “the river,” but that was withdrawn last week. Other universities sought sites at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in midtown Manhattan and on Governors Island.

Falling Short

Before the competition was announced, New York University had planned to expand its recently acquired Brooklyn Polytechnic, but that campus is small and landlocked. Working with five international institutions, it bid for the new campus anyway. Columbia University offered a slice of its $7 billion expansion in Manhattanville, but winning may have required the university to shift away from its medical-research focus.

I hope the high environmental performance and the seamlessly interweaved research and educational facilities proposed by both Cornell and Stanford will spur NYU and Columbia to look anew at their feeble, innovation-averse growth plans.

(James S. Russell writes on architecture for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Island Press has just published his book, “The Agile City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Jeffrey Burke, Lili Rosboch.

To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net. web.me.com/jscanlonrussell

To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

View the original article here