Fernando Gómez-Baquero moved into his one-bedroom apartment on Roosevelt Island one day before the building officially opened in the summer of 2017.

“I convinced them to let me come here early,” said Mr. Gómez-Baquero, the director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute’s Runway Startup postdoc program at Cornell Tech, the technology-based graduate school that opened on Roosevelt Island in 2017. He makes it a habit to try to arrive early in general, whether to new technology or rental housing on the Cornell Tech campus.

Which might explain why he is so pleased to be living in what is being marketed as the world’s first passive-house high-rise, a 26-story tower called The House.

“I geek out on this building,” he said. “I was really fascinated by how you make a building this tall consume 60 to 70 percent less energy.”