Development - High And Tight

Cornell Tech’s towering 352-unit apartment building on Roosevelt Island sets a Passive House record.

- Audrey Gray

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, “in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.” Gazing south from the 26th floor of Cornell Tech’s new residential high-rise, the House, which stands not 500 feet from that bridge in the middle of Roosevelt Island, one can easily feel the same surge of urban ardor. The view includes a sparkling East River, with Queens and Brooklyn on the left, the opaline United Nations complex on the right, and Louis Kahn’s Four Freedoms Park—like a ship’s prow on the tip of the island—dead center. To the north, the view is all Queensboro Bridge, with its classic ivory trusses.