Students create earthy happening to launch life sciences building
By Larry Klaes
It was a happening worthy of late-night TV host David Letterman. The audience of trustees, alumni and faculty had just finished watching a short video, specially produced for the ground-breaking ceremony for the Life Sciences Technology Building (LSTB) on March 11 at Phillips Hall Auditorium. The last scene of the video showed six Cornell sweatshirt-clad students -- with red shovels and buckets on a pile of earth on Alumni Field -- leaping skywards and yelling, "Congratulations!"
At that instant, the same students echoed the word and rushed from the back of the hall wielding their shovels and earth-filled buckets, which they presented to the groundbreaking speakers, including renowned building architect Richard Meier '56.
"Cornell's first cross-campus groundbreaking," exclaimed President Jeffrey Lehman, receiving his bucket of ceremonial soil.
The virtual midwinter groundbreaking for the gleaming white four-story structure -- and the ebullient presentation of Alumni Field soil -- was created to celebrate the final stages of planning for the LSTB, which will begin to rise on the western end of the field in May or June, with completion scheduled for August 2007. The $140 million facility, the university's most ambitious building project yet, was described by Kraig Adler, vice provost life sciences, as "the central capital element in the academic and economic leadership of Cornell."
The new building will be the centerpiece of Cornell's New Life Sciences Initiative (NLSI), a $600 million program involving seven colleges, hundreds of faculty members and up to 60 departments in research across the biological, physical, engineering, computational and social sciences. The LSTB will be home to the Cornell Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology and the Department of Biomedical Engineering, as well as an incubator for start-up businesses.
New York state has provided $25 million to the building project, making the LSTB the largest life-science research facility in the state. It will be, said Lehman in opening the ceremony, a "building as large in scale and bold in design as the research to be conducted in it."
Meier, the architect of the Getty Center in the Santa Monica hills north of Los Angeles, is senior partner of Richard Meier and Partners and a Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 University Professor at Cornell. The LSTB, he told the audience, is "my first academic building anywhere." His goal as an architect, he explained, "is to bring people together to collaborate -- buildings are about people."
Among its many features, the building will have open public spaces that, along with most of the building, will "take advantage of the changing natural light throughout the day," explained Meier. The two-story Learning Center wing extending from the main complex will be a focal point for both formal and informal exchanges among faculty, researchers and students, and tunnels will connect to the nearby Biotechnology Building and Plant Sciences Building, he said.
Meier noted that working on the LSTB had brought him full circle in his career. "I hoped one day I could give back to the place that has given me so much," he said. "The final result [of a building] really depends on the client, and Cornell has been a really great client."
It was nice, Provost Biddy Martin noted, "to have such a great architect who also understands the Cornell culture."
Other ceremony speakers also stressed the importance of the new building and the NLSI to the university and beyond. "Connectivity is the key. NLSI and the LSTB are important for Cornell, Ithaca and the world," said Sanford I. Weill, '55, chairman of the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and a university trustee emeritus. The building and the program have "already propelled Cornell to the forefront of life sciences, which will help millions of lives in many ways," said Peter Meinig, chairman of the Board of Trustees.
As Lehman noted, "Cornell's revolutionary genius has always been in making connections across disciplines that no group or institution has done before."
Originally published in the March 17, 2005 issue of Cornell Chronicle
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