Cornell Tech Hotel and Education Center
Snøhetta provided overall design for the 36,500-square-foot Verizon Executive Education Center as well as façade design for the 196-room Graduate Roosevelt Island Hotel tower.
In addition to jointly supporting the public life of Cornell Tech, the two connected buildings share back-of-house services that enable each to optimize the efficiency of their respective programs. The conference center brings a large reconfigurable banquet hall and four multi-purpose classroom spaces to the site, each one oriented in axis with views of the campus and city.
The modest and centrally located educational building is defined by its intimate, organic form and a warm material palette. A system of vertical aluminum louvers clad in western red cedar cloak the middle two classroom floors, providing a softer complement to the surrounding buildings. These louvres are spaced and angled to frame views of the city, providing a sense of warmth while also highlighting Cornell Tech’s proximity to New York City’s urban core.
The conference center is tucked into the campus where it rises four stories and is wrapped with vertically oriented wood louvers that complement the metallic panels of the hotel tower. Transparent glass panels along the base visually connect interior assembly spaces with adjacent courtyard and landscaped areas, extending views from the main campus entry point into and ultimately through the building.
Upon arriving on campus, visitors first encounter the 18-story hotel tower, its softly curved surfaces wrapped in shimmering double-height aluminum façade panels.
The two buildings, connected physically by the courtyard and sinuous soffit, play off one another visually, each catching and reflecting sunlight in subtly different ways.
The two buildings are aligned along the campus' primary pedestrian path, informally called the Tech Walk, which links the buildings to a series of open spaces located throughout the site. The shared courtyard opens up to this thoroughfare, offering opportunities for Cornell students, hotel guests, and the public to intermix informally.
Construction for the projects concluded in the Fall of 2021, marking the completion of the first phase of the 12.5-acre Cornell Tech campus plan.
Stonehill Taylor was the Architect of Record for the hotel portion of the project; the 196-room hotel’s interiors were designed and coordinated by Nashville-based Graduate Hotels. Snøhetta worked in partnership with Field Operations on the landscape architecture components of the project.
The modest and centrally located educational building is defined by its intimate, organic form and a warm material palette. A system of vertical aluminum louvers clad in western red cedar cloak the middle two classroom floors, providing a softer complement to the surrounding buildings. These louvres are spaced and angled to frame views of the city, providing a sense of warmth while also highlighting Cornell Tech’s proximity to New York City’s urban core.
