John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Designed by SOM, Opened on November 2

November 3, 2011 (New York, NY) –The ribbon cutting ceremony for John Jay College of Criminal Justice, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), took place on November 2, 2011. Located on 11th Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets, the College’s new 625,000-square-foot building provides all the functions of a traditional college campus within the confines of a single city block and doubles the size of John Jay’s existing facilities by adding classrooms, laboratories, auditoriums, faculty offices, and student lounges.

The new building addresses the College’s need for instructional and social spaces and creates a unified academic presence for the institution. “We designed a building for John Jay College that essentially accommodates the needs of an entire campus within a single building,” explains Mustafa K. Abadan, FAIA, Design Partner at SOM. “With our social cascade and rooftop terrace, the students will now have more opportunities for the interaction and chance encounters that are so essential to education.”

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York since 1964, educates 15,000 students annually in emergency response, forensic psychology, and cyber security. Before the construction of the new building, John Jay College was primarily located in Haaren Hall, an early 20th century building fronting 10th Avenue and North Hall, a former shoe factory on West 59th Streetl. The college had been steadily expanding for some time and, after the September 11th attacks on New York, enrollment increased dramatically to the point where the school outgrew its facilities. The new building is a critical component of John Jay’s transformation into a senior college of The City University of New York system and is an expression of the College’s continued commitment to “educating for justice.”

According to Jeremy Travis, President of John Jay College, “With the increasing demand by young people to pursue studies in justice, the College has experienced a steady increase in enrollment. That demand has led to a reimagining of our core curriculum, development of educational partnerships, targeted increases in faculty hiring and an emphasis on faculty and student research. This new integrated will prove a fitting venue, as the College advances its distinctive mission.”

The new building consists of a four-story, 500-foot long podium and 14-story tower. The podium, which provides connections to Haaren Hall, contains dense social and academic programs and is topped by a 65,000-square-foot landscaped terrace that will act as a campus commons. The tower, known as “the cube,” contains faculty offices, academic quads, a conference center, and instructional laboratories. The scale of the new building is similar to its adjacent buildings along 11th Avenue and provides a strong visual presence for the College from the West Side Highway.

The building is clad with aluminum panels and low-E coated insulated glass units. Fritted and transparent glass panels are arranged in a staggered pattern along the building’s facades in which every third panel is clear. Framed glass setbacks placed at specialty spaces, including the cafeteria, research labs, the 250-seat classroom, and a lounge area off the social cascade, allow the building’s diverse programmatic functions to be visible from the exterior, demonstrating the “transparency of justice.” Vertical fins, ranging in depth from three to eleven inches, are arranged in horizontal bands around all four sides of the building. These aluminum fins are finished with silver-speckled mica-flake paint on one side and are silk-screened with a varying pattern of red dots on the other; these two treatments on the fins create a dynamic visual effect depending on the direction from which one approaches the building. Approaching from the east and moving counter-clockwise around the building, the exterior appears red, creating a visual connection to Haaren Hall’s brick exterior. Walking clockwise around the building, the reflective aluminum and glass allude to the glass towers along 11th Avenue.

A 500-foot-long, four story cascade runs the length of the podium, organizing programs both horizontally and vertically. Initiating at the cafeteria level of the tower (level five), the cascade descends with a series of grand staircases, escalators, and stepped amphitheater seating, culminating at the main student entrance on 59th Street and ultimately connecting to Haaren Hall. As the social spine of the campus, the cascade is programmed with open-plan lounges, study areas, and gathering spaces to maximize interaction and student activity. Most of the new building’s classrooms flank this internal avenue, creating a vivacious hub of student activity and also allowing for efficient circulation between classes. A large skylight above the student entrance allows ample daylight to penetrate the cascade. This active social and circulation zone also negotiates the 32-foot grade change between the avenues and enhances the students’ sense of orientation. The cascade also fulfills CUNY’s wellness initiative, which encourages students to walk and use stairs in order to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle.

A 65,000-square-foot roof terrace atop the cascade serves as a new campus green for the college, providing an outdoor central gathering place for students and faculty. The planted green roof is landscaped with large grassy zones for recreation, decked areas for outdoor dining, and paved paths for circulation between buildings. Honey Locust, Magnolia, and Iron Wood trees offer shade along the lawn’s bench-height perimeter barrier. At either end, the commons connects to both the existing Haaren Hall building and the tower through large expanses of glass, which provide access and light for both buildings.

The new building’s interdisciplinary program contains laboratories and high-tech classrooms for the departments of law, police science, criminal justice, mathematics, sciences, government, psychology, and foreign languages. Three double-height academic quads devoted to the college’s main focus areas – science, criminal justice, and humanities – are vertically stacked throughout the 14-story tower. A series of open communicating stairs adjacent to each quad enhances transparency in research and across the academic sectors. Each of these academic quads acts as a central hub for its respective field of study, eliminating traditional “department” floors, maximizing the flexibility of each 40,000-square-foot floor plate, and encouraging collaboration across disciplines.

Comprising a bulk of the academic program, the instructional science laboratories and groupings of 40-person classrooms are located on floors six through eight of the building and are accessible by glass-enclosed communicating stairs to ease student traffic and the flow through the campus. 65 state-of-the-art classrooms, ranging in size from 16 to 45 seats, provide multiple electronic device support, remote management, and simplified laptop connectivity – all administered by a touch control panel. Bigger classrooms, including a 250-seat lecture hall, two 120-seat lecture halls, and one 76-seat lecture hall, accommodate larger groups. Specialized instructional laboratories with heavy audio-visual loads, such as the Emergency Management Lab, the Hi-Rise Simulator, and a Black Box theatre, are located on the second floor. A double-height Moot Court Room, which replicates an actual courtroom and will enable students to learn from simulated courtroom activities, is adjacent to the Criminal Justice quad on the ninth floor.

The presence of Amtrak train tunnels under the southwest corner of the site forced the structural engineers, Leslie E. Robertson Associates, to come up with an unusual structural system for John Jay College’s tower building. The top nine floors of the building are hung from steel outrigger trusses that are supported by the building’s structural core. As a result, these upper floors have no traditional perimeter columns; smaller hanger rods support the floors instead. The lower five floors of the building are supported by a conventional steel frame structural system. Elements of public program such as the bookstore/cafe, child care center, and a computing hub are located at the street level in order to activate the pedestrian and community activity. From a massing point of view, the cantilever of these upper floors responds to the setbacks of the Con Edison power station across the street.

The prominent location of the College in Midtown Manhattan bestows it with a strong civic presence within a section of the city that is experiencing a renaissance. John Jay College will be a significant part of this redevelopment as an institutional anchor for the neighborhood, and a landmark within the community.

About Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) is one of the leading architecture, interior design, engineering, and urban-planning firms in the world, with a 75-year reputation for design excellence and a portfolio that includes some of the most important architectural accomplishments of the 20th and 21st centuries. Since its inception, SOM has been a leader in the research and development of specialized technologies, new processes and innovative ideas, many of which have had a palpable and lasting impact on the design profession and the physical environment. The firm’s longstanding leadership in design and building technology has been honored with more than 1,400 awards for quality, innovation, and management. The American Institute of Architects has recognized SOM twice with its highest honor, the Architecture Firm Award – in 1962 and again in 1996. The firm maintains offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco,  Washington, D.C., London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai and Abu Dhabi.

About John Jay College of Criminal Justice
An international leader in educating for justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York offers a rich liberal arts and professional studies curriculum to upwards of 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 135 nations. In teaching, scholarship and research, the College approaches justice as an applied art and science in service to society and as an ongoing conversation about fundamental human desires for fairness, equality and the rule of law. For more information, visit www.jjay.cuny.edu.