Duffield Hall

Duffield Hall's interior offers spaces that soar, nestle and shine

Photographs by Charles Harrington/University Photography A view from Duffield Hall's fourth-floor penthouse across the north atrium to the building's entrance on Campus Road. At right is the west wall of Phillips Hall.	Visitors to Duffield's third-floor Colloquium Room stand at a railing that soon will be replaced with a stone-floored balcony with a glass handrail.
	Looking upwards to the second and third lab floors in the public stairwell on Duffield Hall's northwest corner.

By David Brand

Probably the best view of the interior of Duffield Hall is from the fourth-floor penthouse, with its muscular exhaust fans and air-handling machines. Look down to the entrance on Campus Road and see the soaring north atrium abutting the west wall of Phillips Hall. Soon, that stripped-down, windowless wall will be connected to the football field-long atrium by multiple windows and acoustical panels. Look up and see 8-foot-deep ceiling wells that will conduct a flood of light from the atrium's huge oval skylights.

The cantilevered Colloquium Room as seen from the Engineering Quad.

The interior of Duffield, the nanotechnology research building that has been rising on Cornell's Engineering Quad since June 2002, provides not only such impressive views but also a number of surprises: that so much has been so swiftly accomplished; that despite as many as 150 construction workers on the project, the interior of the building is so clean; that since Nov. 7 the heat has been on in the first floor; and that despite the critical need for clean room and lab space, this will be a user-friendly building, with abundant spaces for gathering and thinking alongside soaring windows that will flood Duffield with light and campus views.

"This will be the jewel of the campus," said a confident Brian Brown, Duffield construction manager, leading a tour of the building Nov. 12. "At night it will look alive because this is going to be a 24/7 research facility, and light will shine from every window."

Most important, Brown stated firmly, construction is "right on track" for completion of building and relandscaping of the quad by the summer of 2004. In fact, he noted, by the summer of 2003, the building will be essentially complete, with only the south atrium connecting the building to Upson Hall to be completed. Indeed, he said, it would be possible for the new Duffield clean room to be in operation by next August, even before its main occupant, Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF), begins the highly complex move from the adjoining Knight Lab.

Most of Duffield's window framing is complete and the majority of the building-height center bay windows are installed. By year's end, said Brown, the building will be "closed up," with heat turned on to all floors. Then will follow the waterproofing of the building's "skin," the installation of the exterior, pewter-colored aluminum panels and the remaining inch-thick, double-pane windows. "Within a few months, the building will start to have a finished look," said Brown.

Indeed, already it is possible to see what the campus is getting for the $58.5 million cost of Duffield Hall.

The 20,000-square-foot clean room: Coming weeks will see the installation of the ceiling with the insertion of nearly 500 8-foot-square HEPA (high efficiency particulate arresting) air purifiers and the connection of light fixtures. Then will follow the installation of static-dissipating vinyl flooring on the concrete slab and deck. "The finished floor and ceiling will stretch the length of the clean room," said Brown. "And the movable wall system, which will be installed last, will provide a highly flexible space." Some of the newly acquired CNF equipment could be in place in the clean room by next April or May, he said.

Three levels of National Science Foundation-funded facilities on the building's south end: On the first floor will be research space for the Cornell Center for Materials Research; on the second, an office suite for CNF; and on the third, offices for the Nanobiotechnology Center (which also will occupy about 10 percent of the clean room).

Two floors of labs, collaborative areas and space for graduate students: The second and third floors of Duffield will be identical, with a public corridor around the perimeter and labs lining a wide central corridor to accommodate research equipment; in front of the high windows fronting Campus Road will be tables and benches for meetings or work, with floor data ports for laptop computers; and on the west side of both floors are "some of the best graduate student offices on campus," according to Brown. It is a space flooded with light that will have an open office plan, with all furniture on castors so that students can break easily into groups.

The north atrium: High above the entrance from Campus Road a lounge is taking shape, and on the Phillips side rectangular steel boxes will be fitted, each containing a window and covered with noise-deadening panels. "We want people to come into the atrium and be able to talk quietly," said Brown. Looming over the atrium on the south side is a huge two-hour fire wall that late in 2003 will become the portal to the south atrium, replacing Knight Lab and stretching to Upson Hall.

The Colloquium Room: The favored access to this meeting room, cantilevered above the Engineering Quad, is certain to be the planned cascading steps leading from the atrium to the third floor. Already the Colloquium Room has one of the most spectacular views of the campus, and when finished, its west-facing, glazed-aluminum curtain wall will open on to a stone-floor balcony with a glass handrail.

The detailed thinking that has gone into the planning for space and equipment in Duffield Hall will face its greatest challenge in August 2003, when CNF begins its move into the new clean room. On the south wall of the new space is a large wooden panel covering a hole that next year will become a 20-foot-long corridor leading directly into the Knight Lab clean room. The plan, said Brown, is to make this a "clean corridor" that will enable each machine in the CNF's present clean room to be carried through into the new space, avoiding any disruption in the work of the national lab. This exquisitely choreographed maneuver, said Brown, could take about three months.

The building of the corridor will face two major construction problems. One is breaking through into the present Knight Lab clean room, which probably will entail building an air-tight plastic shield in the clean room wall. The other is the four-foot difference in floor height between the new and old clean rooms. This probably will be solved either by building a ramp or installing a lift in the clean corridor.

"It's a challenge, but imagine the time and effort that corridor will save in moving the equipment," said Brown.

November 21, 2002