How do you plan the campus of the future? Try not to. — from chronicle.com by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Excerpts:
“My goal as the dean is to create an environment where everything can be repurposed,” Mr. Huttenlocher says.
He and his team are in the tenuous middle stages of planning and building exactly that: the chameleon campus, a space where interchangeability permeates everything. As Cathy Dove, Cornell Tech’s founding vice president, puts it, “We want to embody the principle of iteration.”
…
“How do you do something that’s technologically advanced that isn’t immediately technologically dated?”
To ask it another way, how do you create a new institution in an age where everything—office design, intelligent infrastructure, cloud computing, classroom technology—presents some opportunity to break with the past? What do you build? What do you wire? What kind of interactions do you encourage? Some institutions might create committees to try to anticipate specific changes. Cornell Tech is determined to do the opposite. Those responsible for building the campus of the future won’t pretend to know what the future holds. They only hope they’re building something malleable enough to handle it.