In December, New York City announced it had selected Cornell, along with partner Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, to build a new applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island.

The master plan for the campus, conceived by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), likely helped the university win the bid, though it didn’t hurt that Stanford, its chief rival, dropped out.

But now, it’s unknown whether SOM will be hired to design the actual buildings. Last Tuesday, Cornell announced a shortlist of six firms to design the main research facility, for which SOM had already proposed a 150,000-square-foot cantilevered structure to be located by the Queensboro Bridge.