The North Campus Residential Expansion at Cornell University is a 776,000-square-foot student life residential complex for first year and sophomore students, providing 2,000 beds on two separate adjacent sites on Cornell’s North Campus. The complex is a programmatic synthesis of residential rooms, a dining marche’, collaborative study and learning spaces organized around outdoor courtyards to meet the University’s growing class size and its commitment to provide exceptional underclassman living learning experiences. The residences are organized into 3 to 5-story courtyard buildings to engage the adjacent campus, to respond to existing site conditions, and to help foster the variety of interstitial and serendipitous collegial exchanges crucial to student life. Central to this organization is a 1,000-seat dining hall that offers a variety of micro-restaurants to enhance the student life experience. In order to meet an aggressive construction schedule of 18 months to house new incoming freshmen, the project relied on modular and prefabricated construction to improve scheduling and local labor market shortages, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each suite bathroom was built as a complete modular pod in a factory, transported to the site, slid into its floor position and plumbing was hooked up. The exterior precast concrete enclosure was prefabricated in a factory as a complete insulating unit, shipped to the site, hung on the structure, and sealed providing a complete exterior and interior enclosure. Lake source cooling and rooftop photovoltaics assist in achieving LEED Gold certification.
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