In 1956, New York University hired Marcel Breuer and Associates to design a series of buildings for the School of Engineering and Science on its Bronx campus. The site overlooked the Harlem River and featured existing neo-classical buildings by Stanford White. The laboratory building known as Technology I was built during the same years as the adjacent lecture hall, Begrisch Hall, and the Residence Hall and Student Center. Breuer and his associate Hamilton Smith designed the simple four-storey rectangular building to house laboratory and office space for the Departments of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Physics. The reinforced concrete structure featured strips of brick veneer alternating with horizontal rows of windows on the long facades while the narrow, windowless ends used the arrangement of the brick veneer to create a decorative pattern. One entrance on the main façade was marked by a vertical concrete screen with a pattern of trapezoidal voids. The other was marked by a dramatic hyperbolic parabaloid canopy like that found at the UNESCO Headquarters Secretariat building. On the opposite façade, a bridge connected the second floor of Technology I to the lecture spaces in Begrisch Hall.