Architecture and Facilities

Architecture That Promotes Collaboration

Located on the south end of The City College campus in Upper Manhattan, the striking, 200,000-square-foot ASRC building embodies a bold vision of 21st-century discovery. At the center’s core is a world-class facility designed to inspire an innovative approach to the scientific method itself, one that links a new wave of talented scientists with hundreds of top researchers from CUNY campuses across the city.

Unlike a standard science building that lays out a biology floor and a chemistry floor and a physics floor, each in its own world, the ASRC is conceived to break down some of the traditional walls in science, incubating a culture of collaboration among researchers in five distinct but increasingly interconnected disciplines. The researchers in each of the five initiatives at the ASRC embrace this concept.  From these collaborations comes transformational science.

While the five flagship initiatives do have their own floors in the ASRC, they are linked by design. With its flowing floor plans and wide-open central stairway, the glass-encased building promotes intellectual cross-pollination and partnerships between labs—a literal vertical integration of big ideas.

Researchers from every corner of the five initiatives are working side by side in ASRC’s core facilities, sharing equipment that is among the most advanced of its kind. The ground floor features a nanofabrication facility that includes a 5,000-square-foot cleanroom where faculty and students throughout CUNY, as well as researchers from government and industry, are able to design and fabricate a wide range of micro and nano structures. The ASRC also offers state-of-the-art nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers, a data analytic center that includes a wall of screens for visualization, and a rooftop observatory using advanced environmental-sensing equipment to collect and analyze earth and atmospheric data from satellites.