Cornell is showing off one of its latest projects, a $60 million facility designed to help some of the up-and-coming stars in the tech industry.
Bill and Melinda Gates Hall is now being occupied by faculty and top-level students, all tied to Cornell’s computing and information science department.
School officials led media outlets on a tour of the new building, which cost over $42 million to build at the corner of Campus and Hoy roads.
“Their vision was to make it a lot like Google and Yahoo, very industrial, so you’re going to see a polished concrete floor. You’ll see an open ceiling, with utilities exposed,” said John Keefe, the senior project manager.
A number of offices still aren’t 100% completed, but school officials say more than 300 students, faculty and administrators are now moving in, or have moved in, to the 101,000 square foot building.
One key to the project was making sure that technology linked Gates Hall to other locations, according to Keefe.
“We don’t do it until the very end, and then, we got to the very end, and they said, ‘We need to be able to talk to NYC tech,'” Keefe said. “We set up a number of rooms, the conference rooms, seminar rooms, so that you can be sitting in there, talking to New York tech, and looking at each other.”
Much of the project’s funding came from donations from the Gates Foundation.
As for the panels on the outside that you can see from Campus Road, Keefe says they are simply a design feature.
