2. The Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island
Next, we have to talk about the Cornell Tech Campus, located on Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River. The campus is home to multiple LEED Certified buildings including the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center (Certified Platinum). The Bloomberg Center has a rooftop photovoltaic array system and geothermal heating and cooling systems that make the building extremely energy efficient. It is also one of the largest Net-Zero energy buildings in the United States. The Bloomberg Center is the academic and power hub on campus, with views of Manhattan across the river. The facade of the building serves as both a climate-friendly tool and a work of art. The stainless steel panels help to trap air and regulate the internal building temperature. The circles that cover these panels and tilt at various angles were determined by an algorithm that was fed an image of the Manhattan skyline and a waterfall in Ithaca, combining the college’s two campuses. The algorithm collected spatially varying statistics from these images and came up with the design you see at this eco-friendly site.