Introducing The Bridge, The Innovation Hub Of New York City's $2 Billion Tech Campus

At New York City's newest university, the Ivory Tower is being declared dead before it even gets built.That's the philosophy embodied in the name The Bridge, one of three buildings slated to open on Roosevelt Island in 2017 in the first phase of building Cornell Techs new $2 billion, 12-acre campus. The Bridge, formerly referred to as the "corporate co-location" building, is where the action will happen."It's taking this notion of the commercialization of academia to a higher plane," says Mary Anne Gilmartin, CEO of Forest City Ratner Companies, the owner and developer of the building.Cornell Tech will lease about one-third of the seven-story building, while a co-working space and a rotating cast of growing startups as well as larger companies will occupy much of the rest of 200,000 square feet of flexible office space. The full campus is pictured here. The companies in the building will be carefully curated by Forest City in discussions with the university.The goal is to bring in an eclectic mix of startups (ideally by graduates of Cornell Tech) and larger companies that are working in program areas that match Cornells focus areas: connective media, the built environment, and health tech. The design of the open, loft-like glass building, which will sit alongside an academic building and residential building, is meant to facilitate interactions. The first phase of the campus, which will ultimately house 2,000 students and hudreds of faculty and staff, is slated to be completed in 2017.

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