Building a home for CU's West Campus residential house plan

A rooftop view of the corner of University and Stewart avenues shows construction of the first component of the West Campus house system, the Alice H. Cook House, scheduled to be open for fall 2004. Robert Barker/University Photography

By Franklin Crawford

Work continues apace on the West Campus Residential Initiative (WCRI) and preparations for phase two of the five-part project are likewise in motion. Cornell has committed $200 million to the project: $177,000 for facilities and $23 million for programming.

Construction unfolded swiftly following the WCRI groundbreaking in April 2003, and anyone familiar with the site can't help but be struck by the dramatic transformations.

"We've been following a very aggressive construction schedule and we're on track," said Jean Reese, WCRI program project leader. "Fortunately many of us on the West Campus project team worked on North Campus and we've been able to apply the many lessons learned in the planning and design of the houses."

Rising at the corner of Stewart and University avenues is the raw visage of Alice H. Cook House, gateway complex and programmatic template for the university's new residential house system. (Read the story.) An unprecedented venture in residential programming for Cornell, the house is named for Cook, a noted professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the university's first ombudsman.

Slated to open in August 2004, Cook House is the first of five houses being built as part of Cornell's West Campus Residential Initiative for sophomores, juniors and seniors. Each house will have its own dining hall, common rooms and library. The entire residential system, including a community center, is scheduled for completion in 2010.

Cook House will be home to about 360 upper-level undergraduates, primarily sophomores; six graduate resident fellows; three undergraduate student assistants; 30 to 35 house fellows who are Cornell faculty and senior staff administrators; and an assistant dean. For three years it will very much be home to faculty member Ross Brann and his family.

Brann, the Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell, was appointed house professor and dean of the Cook House in April.

Cook House and the entire West Campus initiative is emblematic of the Cornell Residential Communities Policy Statement, outlining the university's overarching residential vision. Adopted by the Cornell Board of Trustees in 1996, the statement includes the following:

"Cornell aspires to create an environment where the lives of students inside and outside the classroom form a cohesive experience, with each part positively reinforcing the other."

The WCRI is the second segment of the university's comprehensive residential plan, said Edna Dugan, assistant vice president for student and academic services and co-chair of the West Campus Council. The council is the governing body for the project.

An artist's drawing of a West Campus house library, one of which will be in each new house.

With the opening of the Carol Tatkon Center on North Campus in August 2003, the first part of the residential plan for first-year students neared completion, Dugan said. With West Campus now in progress, the university is focusing on the third piece of the initiative: strengthening and improving faculty engagement programming for the fraternity and sorority residential system, she said.

"We're really reframing the way we look at the entire residential initiative," said Dugan. "We looked at North Campus and West Campus and we've also looked at the fraternities and sororities."

Purely from a bricks and mortar perspective, the WCRI is a perpetuation of the North Campus Residential Initiative. However, the WCRI "is not proposing the addition of any more beds than the 1,800 beds that currently exist," said Dugan,

As on North Campus, the Residential Communities Policy Statement is manifest in the new West Campus architecture and landscape design. Facility-wise, the WCRI incorporates and preserves the gothic halls while replacing the class halls that were built in the 1950s to accommodate matriculating WWII veterans. The West Campus transformation also involves the demolition of Noyes Center and its replacement with a new Noyes community recreation center.

Crews labored for several months to blast, clear and haul bedrock from the Cook House site. In midsummer, flatbed trailers arrived towing massive slabs of pre-cast concrete forms. As the concrete sections were set on foundations and secured, members of the Cornell and the greater Ithaca communities caught their first glimpse of the future skyline of West Campus. Once the slabs were in place, masons applied brick cladding to the concrete facades, with the brick patterned to mimic the stonework of Baker and Boldt halls next door. Finished exterior details call for leaded copper roofing and slate shingles at the tops of the building's end walls, and polished granite porticos. The windows are deep-set, another architectural reference to the gothic halls.

In addition to the construction of Cook House, crews are erecting a residential wing of the yet-to-be-named second residential house, in keeping with phase one plans, Reese said.

Upon completion, the new West Campus houses will be realigned along an east-west axis as opposed to the current north-south configuration, opening the whole site to both the Cornell and Ithaca communities, said Isaac Kramnick, vice provost for undergraduate education and co-chair of the West Campus Council.

Kramnick spoke of the overall design as having three interconnected spaces: the first space being the houses unto themselves, each with its own identity, yet physically open to one another. The West Campus grounds is a second space, with its intersecting pathways that create an integrated whole that yet again opens to the third, larger space, which he described as: "The university and the West Campus neighborhood bordered by the fraternities and cooperatives and symbolized by the Noyes community recreation center."

On an environmental note, Reese pointed out that the project team incorporated "green building" concepts in the design of Cook House and will seek Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, which, if approved, will make this Cornell's first LEED-certified building. The sustainable design goals for the west campus houses include the optimal use of natural light, low energy lighting systems, a mechanical system that controls indoor air quality, and the use of recycled materials and other low environmental impact materials.