As we reported on Monday, Cornell University, in partnership with Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, won $100 million from the city to build a new engineering campus on Roosevelt Island. Among the highlights of the proposal, from a press conference with Mayor Michael Bloomberg:
- It's not scheduled to be completely finished until 2037, but will establish an institutional presence offsite in 2012 and will open on Roosevelt Island in 2017, gradually increasing students and faculty.
- When fully completed, the campus will house approximately 2500 students and 280 faculty members in over 2 million square feet.
- The first academic building will be net-zero energy, meaning it will harvest all the energy it emits on-site. It is the largest such building in the eastern U.S.
- Academics will be divided into “hubs” for different curricula and research in multiple disciplines, with initial hubs focusing on media, healthcare, and integrating applied sciences and architecture.
Columbia's proposal looked to build the Institute for Data Science and Engineering in Manhattanville. The competition was widely seen as a legacy-defining investment by Bloomberg to rival Silicon Valley as well as to bring a new tech presence to New York; Columbia's proposal played up its already existing presence in New York. Check after the jump for more on the proposal that beat it out.
