An Artful Facade

by Marcy Marro | September 2, 2019 12:00 am

Opened in September 2017, the 160,000-square-foot, four-story facility is the “intellectual nerve center” of the campus, providing graduate students, faculty and administrators with a new spot for research and education. Its design reflects on the school’s goals of creativity and design by providing flexible academic spaces while creating new standards in building performance and sustainability. The building has classrooms, instructional labs, conference rooms, a lecture hall, café and other shared spaces.

Site Sustainability

The primary power for the Bloomberg Center is generated on-site, using multiple strategies to achieve a low-energy building through a stepped approach. The architects achieved this by prioritizing energy demand reductions and load reductions, as well as maximizing passive and energy-efficient design through the use of renewable energy to power the building systems.

The all-electric building features a 40,000-square-foot canopy that supports 1,465 photovoltaic panels from Solaria[1], Oakland, Calif., which tops both the Bloomberg Center and the neighboring The Bridge building. The solar canopy converges engineering requirements and architecture to generate solar power while decreasing cooling loads by providing building shading.

Located under the South Lawn, the campus’ main public open space, are 80 closed-loop geothermal wells, each 400 feet deep. Electrically powered ground-source heat pumps are used for heating through perimeter hot-water radiation as well as cooling through an active chilled-beam system.

A 40,000-gallon rainwater harvesting tank is buried under the campus lawn to provide nonpotable water for the building’s plumbing system, cooling tower and on-site irrigation. Located along the southeast outdoor terrace, a low-maintenance green roof planted with native species helps cool roof surfaces and manages stormwater runoff.

Morphosis, along with engineering firm Arup[2], New York City, designed the building’s smart building technology featuring link lighting control, occupancy sensors, security and other building controls to provide on-demand power and respond to user needs and occupancy.

A Porous Façade

The Bloomberg Center’s distinctly curved and porous façade is made up of a unitized system of metal panels, windows and curtainwall. The aluminum panel system wraps the four-story building as a way to decrease its cooling load, while serving as a visual tether for the center’s floating solar canopy. Additionally, the unitized, continuously insulated rainscreen system maximizes insulation values and minimizes thermal bridging.

The aluminum-and-glass façade achieves the recommended 60:40 wall-to-window ratio for balancing opacity, outdoor views and natural light transmittance, with 60 percent of its façade of heavily insulated opaque walls and 40 percent high-performance insulated glass units.

The custom-perforated metal panels for the rainscreen skin were fabricated by A. Zahner Co.[3], Kansas City, Mo. The façade uses Zahner’s Louvered ZIRA system[4], a double-skin façade that operates self sufficiently and is energy efficient, to create the image patterning.

The designs are printed on aluminum panels painted in an iridescent PPG Duranar VARI-Cool coating featuring a copper-brown patina from PPG Industries Inc.[5], Pittsburgh. Formulated with an advanced 70 percent polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) resin, the Duranar VARI-Cool coating combines pearlescent pigments that change color according to ambient lighting conditions, with PPG’s proprietary ULTRA-COOL infrared-reflective coatings technology, which deflects solar heat away from buildings to keep them cooler.

Ung-Joo Scott Lee, principal with Morphosis and project leader, notes, “We were interested in the concept of a dynamic building that changes under different light conditions during different seasons and from different perspectives. We had never used the VARI-Cool product before, but we are always interested in exploring new materials and finishes.”

The design team chose to go with a Copper Brown patina for its wide-ranging browns to greenish-blue hues. “The brown tone provides an industrial machine-finish quality that is similar to the Queensboro bridge nearby,” Lee continues. “The bluish-green hue is the color of the East River and the Cornell Tech landscape. Together they, very literally, marry the building to its new Roosevelt Island campus in New York City.”

Images and Patterns

The continuous image on the façade merges the riverview scenery from Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island location as well as Cornell University’s idyllic campus in Ithaca, N.Y. The building’s west façade, which faces the city, has the image of the Manhattan skyline as viewed directly across the East River. The east façade, situated along the campus’ main entry and central circulation spine, called the Tech Walk, registers an image of Ithaca’s famous gorges.

To create the image patterning, each pixel of the image is translated into the specific turn-and-tilt of a 2-inch circular tab punched into the aluminum paneling. The depth and rotation of each tab determines the amount of light reflected. The pixel map was then fed into a repurposed welding robot that processed the digital information into the mechanical turning-and-tilting of the 337,500 tabs that make up the façade. The algorithm that controls the robot was developed in collaboration with Cornell and MIT students.

Lee says the involvement of students from Cornell and MIT was deliberate and strategic. “We had been working with Zahner for several years because they share our design interests and curiosity, with meticulous care for detail and constructability. The students were engaged because they are talented, but also to emphasize the type of connections that Cornell Tech will foster between academia and the tech industries.”

Scott Moffatt, PPG marketing manager, architectural coil and extrusion coatings, worked with Zahner to ensure the coating would meet the long-term performance challenges associated with the building’s riverside setting. As Moffatt explains, “Zahner contacted us because they planned to laser-cut the perforations into the panels after the coating had been applied, and they were concerned about disrupting the paint finish. They sent us a few sample panels and we ran the corrosion tests. The results were positive, so everything was approved.”

The panels were brought to Calverton, N.Y.-based Island Exterior Fabricators’[6] fabrication shop to be assembled into full megapanels before being shipped via barge across the East River and installed on-site. The prefabricated panels also included glazed window cassettes, architectural louvers and glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) panels. W&W Glass LLC[7], Nanuet, N.Y., supplied its custom unitized curtainwall for the project.

Barr & Barr[8], New York City, was the construction manager-at-risk for the project, which took 28 months to build. The company received the AGC Build New York Award in recognition of excellence in construction management and teamwork for the project. The company is also working on the second project on the Roosevelt Island campus, the Verizon Executive Education Center.

The building is named in honor of Emma and Georgina Bloomberg, in recognition of a $100 million gift from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was responsible for bringing Cornell Tech to New York City.

Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/articles/cornell-tech-bloomberg-center/

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