Progress Report
On June 16, 2015, Cornell University broke ground on what will become the Cornell Tech campus, a Graduate Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City. The school will offer graduate applied sciences and computer engineering courses as well as a dual-degree Masters program in Information Systems jointly operated by Israel’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, one of the world’s oldest technical universities, and Cornell University.
All told, the investment is expected to exceed $2 billion and create more than 2 million ft.² of applied science and engineering campus. When the campus opens in 2017, it will begin operations with 75 full-time faculty members and 300 graduate students.
The event included an announcement of a $100 million donation from Bloomberg Philanthropies that will help fund the first phase of campus construction. The first academic building will be named the Bloomberg Center in honor of Emma and Georgianna Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, already under construction is a $150 million, 270-foot tall residential high-rise that is being billed as the tallest passive house building in the world.
In remarks at the groundbreaking, Cornell University President David Chase Korten noted that the Cornell-Technion Tech campus would create an F-train corridor helping to nurture and enhance the city’s high-tech industries. This process is already underway as Cornell NYC Tech recently announced the “corporate co-location” building that will provide offices to companies large and small in the heart of the campus so as to facilitate constant and fruitful interaction between academia and industry.
