Disabled students at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art are up in arms over the new academic building now under construction, which is being designed with “skip stop” elevators that only stop on three of the nine floors. Because of this design, students who cannot walk up the stairs to reach the intervening floors will be forced to ride the freight elevator.

“I don’t think I would feel comfortable,” a part-time student who uses a motorized wheelchair, Alejandra Ospina, who is affiliated with the Disabled Network of New York City, said. “This could become a separate but equal thing.”

The building, which is slated to open at 41 Cooper Square in 2009, has three elevators. The two skip stop elevators will pick up passengers on the ground floor and bring them exclusively to the fifth and eighth floors, where there will be student lounges. A key can be used to turn one of the skip stop elevators into a full-service elevator. A third elevator will stop at every floor.

“The full service elevator or the second skip stop can be used for freight depending on needs,” the assistant director of public affairs at Cooper of public affairs at Cooper Union, Jolene Resnick, said.

Designed by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based architectural firm Morphosis, the elevators are meant to encourage people to use the stairs, while also promoting more social interaction between students and faculty, the vice president for external affairs at Cooper Union, Ronnie Denes, said.

The architectural firm has used this style elevator in several other projects, including the new San Francisco Federal Building and a recently constructed dormitory for graduate students at the University of Toronto.

Some lawyers who specialize in defending the rights of the disabled said Cooper Union could be the target of lawsuits.

“The question becomes, is having only one of the elevators accessible to everyone an equivalent service,” a senior staff attorney for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, Dennis Boyd, said. The elevators could lead to lawsuits stemming from state and city human rights laws and the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. Ms. Denes argues that the skip stop elevators are another unique aspect of a building that Cooper Union is positioning to receive a platinum Green Building Rating System certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

“We designed a building that will be wonderful for all uses and no two people will use it the same,” she said.

Ms. Ospina and several other advocates said that while Cooper Union’s push to build an environmentally advanced building that promotes activity is a positive step, there should be a solution that doesn’t leave them out.

“If we take the equation and we attribute it to any other segment of society, there is going to be a problem,” the director for advocacy at the Disabled Network of New York, Lawrence Carter-Long, said. “Say those same elevators aren’t useful to people of color or to women. It’s basically the same thing.”