In December, fellows of the Forum assembled to discuss plans for one of New York City’s key new development projects: the CornellNYC Tech campus on Roosevelt Island. The Forum met with Andrew Winters, Director of Capital Projects for the university, to review the master plan and proposed architecture.

Situated just north of Four Freedoms Park on the southern end of the island, the campus will be made up of academic buildings, office space for engineering and technology businesses, and student housing surrounded by abundant open spaces. Visual corridors are planned to preserve visual corridors to the Queens and Manhattan skylines. The project will be completed by 2035, with buildings opening as early as 2017.

In spite of the island’s isolation, the new student population may not be large enough to warrant new transit or pedestrian connections to Manhattan and Queens. And the impact of the university has yet to be measured on the island’s residential community or the rising Long Island City neighborhood. Will the university fight to revive some of the island’s historic character, with car-free streets or a new elevator tower from the 59th Street Bridge? Or will it too closely imitate the suburban office parks of Silicon Valley and feel out of context in New York’s urban environment?

SPEAKERS

			Andrew C. Winters Director of Capital Projects and Planning, CornellNYC Tech Andrew Winters oversees the planning and construction of CornellNYC Tech, a 2 million square feet campus on Roosevelt Island. Prior to his work with Cornell, he was the founding director of Mayor Bloomberg’s Office of Capital Project Development, where he oversaw several of the Bloomberg administration’s most ambitious and complex development projects, including the World Trade Center, the High Line, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the Hunters Point South neighborhood in Long Island City.
			Meredith J. Kane Partner, Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP Meredith Kane is a partner in the Real Estate Department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. She represents developers, investors, and agencies in public/private projects including the acquisition of the World Trade Center complex, the development of Manhattan’s West Side Railyards, the development of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, and the restoration of Grand Central Terminal. She has served as a commissioner on the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and currently serves as the Secretary of the Forum for Urban Design.

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