CornellNYC Tech’s founding dean and provost Dan Huttenlocher cited the Cooper Union building as an important example. “That is a building that makes a statement from the outside as well, but where a lot of attention was paid to the program and the occupants,” Huttenlocher said.

The interior of 41 Cooper Square is instructive. “That building has engineers and scientists and artists and designers brought together in a common space, and therefore it has to really respect the different culture of different communities,” Huttenlocher said.

Thom Mayne cited the San Francisco Federal Building in discussing his experience with sustainable design. Above the fifth floor, instead of using air conditioners it uses a window system. “The window system creates a ‘living skin’ that allows the building to breathe,” according to the Morphosis website.

The Dr. Theodore Alexander Science Center School was intended to “dissolve the boundaries between the building systems and the ground,” according to the Morphosis website. “It’s very much about sustainability but also didactic,” Mayne said. “It talks about the relationship of nature and building.”

Mayne’s design of the NOAA Satellite Operation Facility is “a field of iconic antennae crowns a bar building conceived as the brain, the mission control center, while a disk-shaped building coneived as the body, containing offices and support services slips beneath a landscape of lofted ground,” according to the Morphosis website. Mayne said “If you look at that site, you’ll see all kinds of clues of interests we’ve had that connect to campus."

For the University of Cincinatti Campus Recreation Center, Mayne had to incorporate existing buildings with 350,000 square feet of classrooms, housing and recreational facilities. “It’s not about object building it’s about buildings that make connective tissue and actually glue the campus together,” he said.