After months of discussion, one of the most radical facelifts in the 130-year history of Cornell is finally in the planning stage. If approval is given by the university administration, both a new research center and a major landscaping project could transform the Engineering Quad within three to four years. (See map at end of story.)
The research center, Duffield Hall, will rise on the quad adjacent to the west side of Phillips Hall and stretch the length of the building to Upson Hall. Perhaps the most impressive feature of the three-story building will be a huge atrium connecting Duffield with Phillips and Upson.
Duffield will not be the only change on the face of the quad, whose design and planning date back to the 1940s and 1950s. Additional projects under review include the relandscaping of the quad -- regrading, new paths, lighting, seating and plantings -- and creating a link, possibly a covered walkway, from Upson to Bard, Thurston and Kimball halls.
"Duffield is enabling a planning effort for a new Engineering Quad," said Mark Spiro, associate dean of engineering, who is spearheading the entire project for the College of Engineering.
Duffield Hall, said Spiro, will be one of the most sophisticated buildings ever to rise on the Cornell campus and one of the most advanced university research centers anywhere. The three-story building's first floor will house clean rooms; the second and third floors, wet/dry labs; and a penthouse, mechanical facilities. The largest occupant will be the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF), which will move out of its present quarters in Knight Laboratory (which will either be renovated or demolished and the space incorporated into the atrium). Other facilities will support research and instruction in electronic and photonic devices, microelectromechanical devices, advanced materials processing and biotechnology devices. Duffield's gross area of 100,000 to 120,000 square feet will make it one-third larger than Phillips Hall.
The Duffield project, said Eric Dicke, director of facilities planning, "has shifted from just research to the added role of being a visual image for the college and being a social gathering space." That is because of the commanding atrium, which, he said, will be both a pedestrian corridor and a destination point. Robert Stundtner, Cornell's project manager, said suggestions from the engineering community include an air-conditioned atrium -- complete with trees and gardens, seating for meetings and coffee stands -- that will provide both a walk-through and quiet alcoves for study.
The impetus for the $40 million building is a $20 million gift from David A. Duffield, chief executive officer and founder of PeopleSoft Inc., Pleasanton, Calif., who graduated from Cornell with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1963 and a master's degree in business administration in 1964. In addition, the College of Engineering has raised $15 million from alumni. Additional funds still will be required to complete the overall plan.
Cornell's Facilities Planning Office has put the plan into motion by issuing site design criteria, the first stage in the approval process. Among the criteria is the admonition that "design of the new building must be linked to a comprehensive plan for the quad."
The final details of the project will be presented by the management committee to the university's Capital Funding and Priorities Committee, possibly in the spring. If there is approval, trustee authorization for construction could be sought as early as the fall.
"With the difficult decision of siting Duffield Hall now behind us, I am eager to press forward on the project to realize our vision that Cornell University and the College of Engineering will be the nation's leader in nanotechnology as we move into the next millennium," said John Hopcroft, dean of the College of Engineering.
Planning has not reached this stage without considerable debate, and even disagreement. After the project management committee presented its proposal to site Duffield alongside Phillips to faculty last May, "some faculty were quite upset," said Clifford Pollock, professor of electrical engineering and academic program leader for the project. Pollock believes that the plans met such resistance in part because the engineering faculty not directly connected with Duffield had not been adequately consulted. As a result, the plans were shelved for six months while a faculty siting committee, composed of 10 faculty members, one from each school in the College of Engineering, considered its own proposals.
Last November the group issued its recommendations, most notably that the original site for Duffield, west of Phillips, is the most acceptable. But the faculty committee greatly expanded the size of the proposed atrium to serve a larger segment of the community and added new features to the project.
The report stated: "The inclusion of the additional elements in the recommendation emerged as a critical element of the site committee's deliberations. Without these enhancements the committee was deeply divided, reflecting the profoundly divisive impact that a more narrowly defined Duffield program would surely have on the engineering college."
Most of the elements of this report have been accepted by the project's management committee. Now, to go forward, said Stundtner, "there needs to be a tremendous amount of collaboration."
University Architect Peter Karp is particularly pleased with the choice of the Los Angeles office of Zimmer, Gunsul, Frasca Partnership of Portland, Ore., as the Duffield architects.
"We went through a very rigorous selection process, and we have picked an outstanding firm with an international reputation and one with broad experience in the design of high-tech projects that includes building clean rooms," Karp said.
The architects have begun work on the building design following 18 months of site-selection analysis and programming. Two weeks ago they held meetings with engineering faculty and university personnel, beginning a detailed phase that will take 12 to 18 months. Once approved, the actual construction is expected to take another two years or more.
For the quad redesign, the international firm of landscape architects, EDAW of Alexandria, Va., which designed parts of the National Arboretum and the Washington Mall, have been hired. The two massive projects will proceed concurrently.
These are among the elements of the Duffield Hall project recommended by the faculty siting advisory committee and accepted by the management committee:
"Cost control is very much at the center of the management team's concerns," said Spiro. To ensure strict adherence to economy, the team has taken the unusual step of requesting separate estimates in all areas, from labs to offices to utility areas, from the architects and from the preconstruction consultant, McCarthy Contractors of St. Louis.
"This project is so sophisticated that costing is more complex than with a standard building," said Spiro.
Once budgets are finalized, said Dicke, the strategy is to break the entire construction proposal into two project approval requests (known as PARs) to present to the Capital Funding and Priorities Committee. The first would be for Duffield, the atrium and other modifications to buildings. The second would cover the landscaping of the quad.
By the time the project goes to contractors for bids, the source of the additional funding -- that is, beyond the $40 million cost of Duffield Hall alone -- will have to be firmly secured. The first phases of the project, possibly next year, will be the relocation and reconfiguration from the Engineering Quad of the dense cluster of utilities that serve the campus, including water and steam lines and sewers.
At the same time, a sizable service yard will be developed east of Phillips to provide supplies to the project site and waste removal. Then will follow the construction of Duffield, the building of the atrium and the connections to Upson.
To bring the many elements of the plan together, the faculty siting committee has been disbanded, and three new committees composed of Cornell faculty and potential users of Duffield have been formed to advise on the external design features of the quad and the connections to Duffield and the atrium, to advise on internal design and function of Duffield, and to report on safety and management systems within the building.
"Faculty are now thoroughly involved," said Pollock.
Spiro said this last committee was established to ensure that faculty would be actively involved in assessing and strengthening the design of the building's safety and management systems. In addition, two environmental consultants have been hired: ENSR-Galson on waste water and air dispersion and EBI for the building's internal environment, such as mechanical systems and waste treatment facilities.
The safety of all operations in Duffield was a major concern of faculty, Pollock said. "They want to make the building certifiably safe."
Both Karp and Spiro concurred.
"This building will be absolutely safe or we will not build it. It will be both safe and environmentally friendly," Spiro said.
Duffield itself will present the architects, contractors and management team with some very high-tech problems. Its clean room for such tasks as nanofabrication and semiconductor research will rival systems found at only a handful of universities and research laboratories around the world. The 17,000 square feet of clean room space will require large-scale filtering systems to make the air ultra-pure.
Spiro also noted that the intent is to make this "a 100-year building," an effort that will require unusual flexibility in design to accommodate shifting research needs over the years. This will mean design labs that can easily convert from wet to dry to toxic status with a minimum of disruption. The building also will contain 20,000 square feet of lab space and 15,000 square feet of meeting, common and office space.
The major decision reached to date concerns CNF. There is wide agreement on a minimum of disruption to the center's work during construction and during its move into the completed Duffield. Any temporary closure of the center must be approved by the National Science Foundation, which funds the facility as a national center.
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