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CUNY Tackles Varied Goals, with $2.5-Billion to Spend

(newyork.construction.com, May 2006 issue)

By Diane Greer

Burgeoning enrollments, facility upgrades, and a renewed emphasis on the sciences are driving a new construction program at the City University of New York.

The 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, and graduate, law, professional studies, and biomedical education schools that make up the university already serve more than 200,000 degree candidates and another 220,000 continuing education students in more than 300 buildings. And enrollment is up 16 percent since 2000.

The need for space and for facility and program upgrades dominated the new capital plan adopted last year by New York City's public university system, said Emma Espino Macari, the vice chancellor of facilities planning, construction, and management.

"When we put together our second five-year plan, we identified a need for close to $10 billion worth of construction," she said.

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Eventually, budget constraints forced Macari's team to narrow the capital construction plan to $3.5 billion, and in mid-2005, the state legislature and governor funded it at $2.5 billion over five years.

Macari said various factors are helping to shape the overall construction program, including the system's increasing enrollment and the need to expand and upgrade the university's aging building stock. Other trends coming into play include sustainable design strategies, flexible space-use features, and an overall effort to make new structures more functional for modern higher education needs.

But cost pressures have still made the program difficult to plan, Macari said. Construction material costs, originally estimated in the plan adopted last year to escalate at 2 to 5 percent, have skyrocketed by 20 to 25 percent because of the impact of last year's Gulf Coast hurricanes on the marketplace. The cost spikes have delayed the start of several projects, Macari said, including a new School of Architecture building on the City College campus in Manhattan.

To maximize available capital resources, Macari said CUNY is negotiating plans for public-private partnerships that will leverage the location of attractive development sites in order to create mixed use projects.

"Some of our facilities are sitting on valuable land that has a lot of air rights," she added. "We are selling those air rights to developers, and they are building us academic facilities at the bottom of the buildings."

For instance, Macari is finalizing an agreement to sell the air rights over a building at City College of Technology in downtown Brooklyn. The existing structure onsite would be demolished, and Renzo Piano of Italy has been hired as the architect for a new mixed-use facility that would replace it.

Macari said she also is exploring similar air-right sales and mixed-use projects for Hunter College on Manhattan's Upper East Side and in the Jamaica section of Queens.

New Projects across the System

The common denominator across the capital program is an attempt to address the university's pressing academic needs, said Meghan Moore-Wilk, director of space planning and capital budgets.

"The academics drive everything we do," she added.

For example, a new 600,000-sq.-ft. building planned at 11th Avenue and 59th Street in Manhattan for John Jay College of Criminal Justice specifically targets overcrowding in the rapidly expanding academic program.

"Even with the new building, John Jay will have one of the lowest square-foot-to-student ratios in the system," Moore-Wilk said.

The $457 million North Hall project will include a 14-story tower clad in a glass curtain wall. A low-rise structure with a landscaped outdoor area on its roof will link the tower to John Jay's existing Haaren Hall.

The project was slated to begin earlier this year, but legal issues have delayed demolition at the site. A major stumbling point is a pending agreement with Amtrak, the passenger rail carrier, to ensure proper ventilation of a rail tunnel running beneath the site.

Another glitch is a dispute with the current tenant of a building on the site that would be demolished to make way for the new facility. The tenant recently lost a challenge of its eviction under eminent domain proceedings, according to Claudia Hutton, a spokeswoman for the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, which acts as the program manager for various CUNY projects.

Another program with significant space needs is Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. Macari said her team recently completed the acquisition and conversion of a bowling alley into a student services building and purchased a city sanitation garage across the street, which will be taken down to make way for a $159 million, 188,800-sq.-ft. academic building.

Construction was slated to begin in April on the new building designed by New York-based Polshek Partnership. A joint venture of New York-based Turner Construction and Philadelphia-based McKissack and McKissack is managing the project, which will be bid out for subcontractors in 19 separate packages under a set-aside program for minority contractors. Work would be complete in April 2010.

Modern science facilities comprise another prime feature of the new capital plan because CUNY's chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, has made it a priority, Macari said.

"The chancellor has declared this the decade of science," she said.

In that vein, two new science buildings, costing $381 million and totaling 390,000 sq. ft., are planned on the system's flagship campus at City College of New York in Harlem.

The 189,000-sq.-ft. CUNY Advanced Science Research Center will focus on biosciences and biosensing studies and will serve all of the system's campuses. The second 200,000-sq.-ft. building will house a science academic program specifically for City College.

Kohn Pedersen Fox and Associates of New York and Flad & Associates of Stamford, Conn., are jointly designing the two science facilities, on which construction is slated to begin in July 2007 and finish in August 2009.

Another project that is likely to be built green is a $60 million, 55,000-sq.-ft. science building at Herbert H. Lehman College in the Bronx, which will focus on plant science and ecology.

"At Lehman, we are shooting for LEED silver certification," said Eduardo Del Valle, director of design and construction management for CUNY. He added that some of the planned features could include the installation of wind turbines and a living machine, which employs plants in greenhouses to purify wastewater from the building and in turn recycles that water for use in toilets and urinals.

The Lehman facility is under design by Perkins + Will of New York and is slated to have construction begin in June 2008 and finish in June 2010.

Flexible space use is another primary focus of the capital program. Moore-Wilk said that workrooms, study spaces, and computer labs throughout the university will be prepared to accommodate classes as enrollment increases.

The flexible push will especially apply to the science facilities, Moore-Wilk said. Laboratory space will be open, flexible, and shared.

"This allows bench space to be assigned by the size of the grants," she added.

The university's construction program also calls for replacing obsolete facilities and moving programs into more functional spaces.

For example, at Brooklyn College, a new $116 million, 141,000-sq.-ft. academic building is replacing a recently demolished antiquated structure. The new West Quad building, which has a structural steel frame with concrete decks and is clad in precast brick veneer, glass curtain wall, and metal panels, includes a new gymnasium and pool built to NCAA competition standards, said Frank Frasco, chief project manager on the effort for the Dormitory Authority.

Turner is construction manager and AMCC Corp. of Brooklyn is general contractor on the project, which was designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects of New York. Work is slated to begin this spring and wrap up in July 2008.

Similarly, a $66.6 million renovation of a vacant library on the City College campus will create a new home for its School of Architecture, which is currently cramped in an outdated facility, Moore-Wilk said. The new 105,000-sq.-ft. facility will feature a large atrium with a skylight and a rooftop amphitheater.

Crews began gutting the library last June and removed its exterior.

However, first-round construction bids were over budget, delaying the start of further renovations, Frasco said.

"We have implemented some value engineering and looked at other cost savings components," he added.

The project went out for rebid over the winter.

Viñoly is also designing the architecture center, which is slated for completion in fall 2009.

One of the new capital plan's signature projects will be the reconstruction of Fiterman Hall, which sits near the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan and sustained heavy damage from the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The new $202 million, 377,000-sq.-ft. building will house classrooms, a library, and instructional facilities for the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

The project awaits U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approval of an environmental remediation and deconstruction plan for the existing structure. The Dormitory Authority has Requests for Proposals out for decontamination and deconstruction and expects to conduct that work during the spring and summer and start rebuilding in the winter, the authority's spokeswoman Hutton said.

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners of New York is architect on the project, which will wrap up in August 2008.

A final theme tying together the varied projects in the plan is an effort to build structures that will have a fitting and long legacy in the system, Del Valle said.

"The emphasis is on good architecture, constructing buildings that are both functional and meaningful," he added. "We are looking to leave behind future landmarks."