By Roger Segelken
It's hard to say who gets the best accommodations at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's newly opened Imogene Powers Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity.
|
|
| A duck's-eye view of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's new Imogene Powers Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity, designed by CU alumnus Alan Chimacoff. Visitors and staff members get a more spacious observatory, looking out on the pond, while birds get more wetlands and a building that resembles a bird's head, from above. Diane Tessaglia/CLO |
The lab's faculty, researchers, students and staff who moved in this spring from 14 locations in the Ithaca area are together, at last, in mission-friendly workspaces they helped design.
Visitors by the thousands can easily spend a day learning about birds and ornithological research in hands-on exhibits, multimedia presentations, the indoor observatory or the Sapsucker Woods Sanctuary, where part of the four-mile trail system is now handicap accessible.
And birds are treated to a much-expanded feeding garden, more wetlands than ever, avian-friendly landscaping and a $26.5 million, 90,000-square-foot building, which, from overhead, looks something like a bird.
Certainly, birds have the best "parking" accommodations, in the ponds right outside the observatory windows where waterfowl can feed, dabble, court a mate or rest during migratory flights, and in the 27,668 trees and other plants that were installed.
But vehicular parking isn't so bad, either, and that's the first impression for visitors about to tour the new Johnson Center. Instead of acres of sun-baked asphalt, smaller parking clusters are visually isolated by shady greenery. Walkers approach the new building (although drive-up access is available, as needed) on winding paths and bridges over some of the water features.
Cedar-scented wood siding and ruggedly textured, locally quarried stone create the next impression -- as if the building, designed by Cornell alumnus Alan Chimacoff of the Princeton, N.J.-based Hillier Group Architects (read related story), had been chiseled in place from fortuitously found materials. Through the doors to the visitors center, the stonework continues in fireplaces and walls, while hardwoods make up the molding details, stairways, cabinetry and seating, including chairs crafted nearby in Trumansburg with backs carved in bird motifs.
First-time and returning visitors are drawn, understandably, to the Morgens Observatory with its two-story wall of windows that overlooks the birds' world outdoors. Microphones and spotting scopes bring the sounds and sights inside, but the building's designers hope birds won't try to follow. Rather than looking like a vast mirror or the wild blue yonder, the window-walls have irregularly spaced, protruding mullions dividing smaller sheets of glass, a visual hint that the three-dimensional thing constitutes a no-fly zone. And the larger, plate-glass windows at the feeding garden are shielded by resilient netting, to give absent-minded birds a chance to recover from pilot errors.
If real birds aren't enough (lab staffers identified more than 50 species while moving into the building in March and April, and dozens more are expected when the construction commotion abates) the interactive exhibits, designed and built with a National Science Foundation grant, offer the virtual kind. One exhibit, for example, recreates the high-tech workstations used by bioacoustics researchers to analyze natural sounds (although visitors manipulate sounds via a touch screen and mouse, rather than by adjusting the innumerable switchers and dials of the audio consoles).
Inside the 10-seat mini-theater, where surround-sound effects include subwoofer speakers in the floor, visitors can choose which 8-minute, multimedia presentation to activate. In the 140-seat auditorium, longer multimedia presentations are combined with birders' tools-of-the-trade in what planners call object theatre. Adjoining the auditorium (or closed off with sliding doors, for special occasions) is the most beloved part of the old Stuart Observatory, the cider-block structure erected in 1956 and torn down to make way for the feeding garden -- the Fuertes Room.
This is the second move for teak-paneled room with commissioned paintings by Louis Agassiz Fuertes; it had been a library in a Connecticut mansion before coming to Sapsucker Woods. More Fuertes paintings, including some never before publicly displayed, adorn the walls of the center's public spaces, as do works by other wildlife art notables in the Williams Gallery of Art.
Visitors who are motivated to get more involved in birding can shop for books, recordings and paraphernalia in a franchised location of the Wild Birds Unlimited company. The Adelson Library, the 20th and newest in the university's system, is open to the general public, although check-out privileges are limited to ID-bearing members of the Cornell community. Still, any browser can relax with a book in the adjacent Allen Bird Observation Tower.
Lab staffers are encouraged to mingle with visitors, when they're not working in the non-public section of the new building. That area is home to the lab's research, conservation, citizen science and education programs, such as the Macaulay Library, the world's largest collection of natural sounds and a rapidly expanding video library, with storage for analog and digital recordings, field-recording equipment, studios and production facilities. There, juke boxes in a Web-based resource swing into action, grab a disk and serve up recorded material on demand for users worldwide.
The Bioacoustics Research program also has much-enlarged facilities as well as a shop to build special devices, such as the "pop-ups" that record marine mammal noises beneath the sea and rise to the surface for retrieval, or the weatherproof recorders that perched in trees in Louisiana and Cuba during the audio hunt for the fabled ( and perhaps extinct) ivory-billed woodpecker.
There's also a DNA sequencing facility, faculty offices with scenic views that are bound to be distracting, workspaces and offices for graduate students. Researchers in the National Audubon Society's Seabird Restoration Program are headquartered here, when they're not on rocky islands in Maine or elsewhere in the world, enticing birds to come back to former habitats.
A newly coined abbreviation, CUMV, stands for the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates, which consolidates collections from the research park at the airport and other locations, and also offers preparation labs, office space for curators, a 35-student teaching lab and a room with a curious name -- the Dermestarum. There, dermestid beetles clean flesh to the bone of future museum specimens more efficiently than any human curator could.
The building was designed to enclose all heating, ventilation and air-conditioning machinery below the streamlined roof. Thus, birds flying overhead might, with a little imagination, note the building's resemblance to the Lab of Ornithology's logotype, itself a stylized representation of a hawk's head.
Birds also are honored inside the building, where most spaces not named for prominent donors instead bear avian appellations. The Raven Room recalls that oft-quoted bird and the Pootoo Room could accommodate a small conference of that tropical species. But the Parus Room? That one will be a puzzle to anyone who forgets the genus to which chickadees and titmice belong.
Community Open House
Saturday, June 21, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Imogene Powers Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
159 Sapsucker Woods RoadTours, bird walks, door prizes, bird call contests, bird-feeding workshops, book signings, face-painting and more.
Free parking and shuttle from "A" Lot on Pleasant Grove Road. For more information: 254-2473, www.birds.cornell.edu
Birding by the numbers
14,950 -- Square footage of the previous building, the Stuart Observatory
90,000 -- Size of the new Imogene Powers Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity
196 -- People working in the new building
160,000 -- Animal sounds in Macaulay Library
1,200,000 -- Approximate number of fish specimens in the new Museum of Vertebrates
49,000 -- Bird specimens in the museum, about half the world's species
Source: Lab of Ornithology Birdscope
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |