The Bridge building, Cornell Tech Campus

The seven-storey Bridge building spans 189,000 square feet and weighs 1,800 tons. The building houses both students and high-tech companies and is meant to be a bridge between the two—hence the name. The building’s striking geometric profile gives it a style all its own. To create the building’s large expanses of column-free space, we had to manufacture huge cantilevered beams to support the upper floors and install a temporary shoring system to support the beams themselves during installation. The project came with a lot of other challenges: use of barges to cross the East River to get the structures to Roosevelt Island, police escorts to transport certain parts through New York City because of their size (up to 14 feet wide), design and construction of an access corridor so the barges could bring parts right up to the dock, etc.

Client
Turner Construction Company

Architect
Weiss/Manfredi

City
Roosevelt Island, New York

Year
2016