Milstein Hall is the first new building to go up for Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning in a hundred years. Without succumbing to stylistic mimicry but at the same time avoiding isolation in the environment, the building inserts itself amid three existing ones, serving to connect them, providing new routes between the interior and the exterior, and enlarging the premises of the school by 47,000 square meters of new classrooms, a gallery, and an auditorium. The project unfolds from a series of contrasts. Typologically, the modern ‘box,’ usually presented as an isolated object, functions as a hinge giving continuity to the existing buildings. For its part the program is layered in two distinct areas, each associated with a particular structural solution, catalog of materials, and atmosphere. Hence whereas the upper floor, defined by a framework of steel crosses, presents a luminous and practically unpartitioned space, the ground floor – a telluric half-buried space rendered with a structure of imposing concrete beams – houses an auditorium topped by a dome that emerges through the upper slab and comes in visual conflict with the rectilinear structure. Finally, a landscaped roof perforated by skylights crowns the complex.