Engineering’s longterm facilities master plan charts course for the 21st Century

By Robert Emro

Cornell Engineering has big plans.

In 2005, the College of Engineering published a strategic plan setting five goals essential to achieving its mission of exceptional education, research excellence, and service to society (see Strategic Goals below). Each goal reinforces the others; to be consistently considered one of the top five engineering colleges, for example, requires educating the most sought-after engineering graduates in the world. But perhaps no single goal is more important to fulfilling the others than having top-notch facilities.

Now, after a year-long study with input from faculty, students, alumni, and staff, the college has completed the first step in achieving that key goal with the approval of a facilities master plan. Developed with the Philadelphia-based architecture and engineering firm Ballinger, the $440-million plan calls for the construction of several new lab facilities, the demolition of buildings, and renovations around the quad. Besides an additional 260,000 gross square feet of much needed program space, the plan promises to transform the Engineering Quad into a celebrated campus gateway, enhance the college’s identity, and create more common spaces in which the engineering community can meet and share ideas.

“Engineering is now driving with a roadmap toward our vision of having facilities that are second to none,” says Kent Fuchs, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering. “This is an ambitious goal, but one that is entirely possible and absolutely necessary if we are to have a physical environment that inspires and enables excellence.”

The Engineering Facilities Master Plan predates Cornell’s Comprehensive Master Plan, still in its formative stages. Where the university’s plan will use broad strokes to paint a picture of the entire campus far into the future, the college’s plan uses fine brush work to portray a more immediate prospect for the 13 buildings around the Engineering Quad, right down to the fire alarm systems.

“The College of Engineering Master Plan is doing a lot to inform the university’s Comprehensive Master Plan,” says Kyu-Jung Whang, Cornell’s vice president for facilities services. “In itself, it’s very comprehensive and well thought out.”

Like children who remain the same height for months and then shoot up several inches seemingly overnight, college facilities tend to grow in spurts. Cornell Engineering saw its last major growth spurt in the 1950s, when Kimball, Thurston, Phillips, Carpenter, Upson, Hollister, and Grumman halls were all built. Today, their infrastructure is hard-pressed to meet the demands of modern research and instruction.

“We’ve examined all of the building assets that the College of Engineering manages and we’ve concluded that our facilities come far short of our aspirations as a college over the next 50 years,” says master plan steering committee member Lance Collins, professor and S.C. Thomas Sze Director of the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

Retrofitting these older buildings, many of which were designed as classroom spaces, with the modern systems required by today’s research and instructional labs—electrical, plumbing, telecommunications, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning—would be more expensive than building new ones in many cases, and impossible in others, given their minimal floor-to-ceiling heights.

“Some of these buildings, skeletally, cannot accommodate the upgrades that we need,” says Collins. “Modern mechanical engineering includes nano-fluidics, biomechanics, MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems)—areas that require laboratories with a lot more services.”

But the changes called for in the master plan are driven by more than the need to modernize. Since the construction of these buildings, the College of Engineering has grown significantly. Since 1965, the faculty has increased 44 percent, the undergraduate population 28 percent, and the number of Ph.D. candidates 91 percent, according to data gathered during the master planning process. The amount of net assignable square feet has also grown, but only by 35 percent. So while the average space per undergraduate has increased slightly, the space per faculty member has actually decreased and the space per Ph.D. candidate has plummeted. In the same time period, the master of engineering degree has grown tremendously, increasing its enrollment from 34 to 405 students. Add to that an increase in research staff driven by a doubling of research dollars, top with 13,000 pieces of capital equipment, and you have a recipe for space crunch.

These numbers helped the college chart where it is going, as well as where it has been. “I think you need controlled growth and this was a way to make us go back to the drawing board and make us think about the rational plan of departments,” says steering committee member Paulette Clancy, professor and the William C. Hooey Director of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “There was a lot of self study that went behind all of this.”

The planning process also highlighted qualitative changes in engineering education over the past half century that create demands on space independent of the college’s growth. Today, engineering education emphasizes group study and hands-on learning. In 1965, only a score of students participated in project teams. Today, that number is more than 450. Undergraduate research has also become much more prevalent—44 percent now do some form of research with faculty. And the growth of the master of engineering program has added greatly to the number of design projects completed every year.

“There’s so much more group study now in terms of the way learning is being implemented compared to 20 years ago, so you need spaces where that group learning can be fostered,” says Ballinger Architecture Principal Terry Steelman. “The other top engineering schools with whom Cornell competes, such as MIT, have highly invested in these types of spaces in all of their research buildings.

The increasingly interdisciplinary nature of teaching and research, especially in the new areas identified in the College’s strategic plan (see Research and Education Foci), is also driving the need for changes called for in the plan. “The old paradigm of the professor who can say, ‘There’s my lab’ is giving way to groups of faculty with shared space,” says Collins. “We have faculty with well defined disciplines, but they are linked together on projects that are crossing over these boundaries, so it’s natural for them to want the students and labs involved to overlap to some degree.”

With its emphasis on the direction of future research, the college’s master plan becomes more than just a plan for buildings. “It’s really a conceptual view of what the College of Engineering will look like programmatically in the next 25 to 30 years, in terms of the needs of students and faculty,” says Stephen Golding, Cornell’s Samuel W. Bodman Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration. “At the end of the day, facilities are a manifestation of the academic plan for the college.”

Several building projects currently under way or in the planning stages will provide modern labs for some departments (see Building for the Future). And Duffield Hall, completed in 2004, has provided state-of-the-art facilities for nanoscale science and engineering. But Ballinger found that this will not be enough to meet the needs of the college in the coming decades. The master plan calls for a new building to house the mechanical and aerospace and civil and environmental engineering programs in a flexible research-focused lab facility, as well as two major lab additions, to Olin Hall and the Kimball-Thurston-Bard complex, and an addition to Phillips Hall.

Preserving the existing open space around the quad was a top priority for the college, so to make way for the new lab building, the plan calls for the demolition of Carpenter Hall, home of the Engineering Library and the central college administration, and part of Hollister Hall, home to Engineering Admissions and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Ballinger found that these two buildings made inefficient use of space on the quad, lacked the structural “bones” necessary for modern labs, and did little to take advantage of their prime location.

“We believe at the corner of College Ave and Campus Road there needs to be a building that invites you into the College of Engineering Quad and establishes the identity of the college,” says Steelman. “By location Carpenter could be a gateway to the entire campus, but in fact it’s not. Right now, you don’t feel like you’ve arrived at the campus until you’re beyond the College of Engineering.”

Duffield Hall, opposite the quad from Carpenter, is a clear example of what Steelman is talking about. Visit the building on any day during the school year and you will find not just high-tech clean rooms full of researchers in “bunny suits,” but also three connected atria—an open, vibrant place full of energized people sharing ideas, studying for exams, grabbing a bite to eat—the kind of place that attracts top students and faculty and inspires those already here to greatness. It has unmistakably enhanced the identity of the college as a place where the next great discoveries are being made.

Visit the older buildings around the quad, however, and you would probably not suspect that inside, some of the world’s best education and most advanced research is happening. “What’s going on inside those buildings is much more sophisticated than what they convey,” says Steelman. “The image of the college needs to be more tightly linked to the ideas and actions they are built to support.”

Such intangible things as identity and image can be difficult for engineers to give weight to, says Collins, but are nevertheless important. “This is where the architect’s eye is essential,” he says. “Engineers tend to focus on square footage, but the architects realize that space has a symbolic aspect to it as well, and our college needs a well defined presence on the campus.”

The atria in Duffield are integral to creating its identity and the master plan calls for more common spaces like that around the quad. “We’ve been compressed and one of the key things that has suffered is the lack of communal spaces,” says Clancy. “I think having such places is very important and there is an attempt in the plan to find communal spaces in every building.”

Another way the planned upgrades will enhance the identity of the college is by making it more sustainable. “An engineering school needs to set the example for what we can do to minimize our energy consumption, so we’ve established aggressive benchmarks to make these buildings more efficient than they are now,” says Steelman. “It is a high priority for us, for the university, and for the college.”

Minimizing disruption during implementation of the plan was a complicated logistical puzzle. “The complication is that there’s very little swing space,” says Collins. “Every nook and cranny we can legally occupy is occupied.”

Ballinger’s solution is an implementation plan with a year-by-year set of steps that must happen in exact order, like dominoes falling, as units are relocated to new homes around the quad. So, for example, once the schools of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering move into the new building on the site of Carpenter Hall, Upson Hall will be renovated to accommodate the Engineering Library, Admissions, Student Services, and College administration, as well as additional space for the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The college has started with infrastructure upgrades to Olin Hall, site analysis for the building to replace Carpenter Hall, and a construction feasibility study for enhancing Philips Hall, but it will take more than a decade, and approvals at each stage, for the plan to be fully realized.

When the work is done and each unit is settled into its new home, Cornell Engineering will look and feel like a whole new place—one more in keeping with what you would expect from a top-ranked engineering school. “A physical environment can either constrain creativity and productivity, or it can inspire and enable excellence,” says Dean Fuchs. “This major revitalization of our facilities and technical infrastructure will ensure Cornell Engineering remains among the best engineering schools
in the world.”