Most observers would agree that the words “iconic” and “architectural masterpiece” don’t belong in the same breath with Cleveland’s new convention center and Global Center for Health Innovation.
But that’s not to say the two interconnected buildings are a failure. Far from it.
The $465 million project, amazingly finished slightly under budget and three months ahead of schedule, has given Cleveland a new convention center and medically-focused exhibit hall that are big, smoothly functional, crisply organized and very easy to navigate.
The two buildings, which open officially tomorrow with a ribbon-cutting, followed by free public tours from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, project a solid image of Cleveland as a city able to complete large projects in a timely, efficient manner. That’s a welcome change for a community with a historical reputation for dysfunction that’s fighting poverty and decline.
If managed well by MMPI Inc. of Chicago, the new buildings have a decent shot at attracting scores of conventions that will boost the city’s economy and justify the quarter cent increase in the county’s sales tax that financed the project.
In terms of aesthetics, the success is more muted – at least at this point. County Executive Ed Fitzgerald and Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson announced last week that they plan to leverage $93 million collected from the sales tax — an amount higher than expected — to finance up to $350 million in additional projects that will enhance to convention and innovation centers.
Those additional elements would include a new, 650-room convention center hotel, and a walkway spanning railroad lines and the Shoreway to connect the convention center to lakefront attractions at North Coast Harbor.
A redesign of Public Square and landscape enhancements to the downtown Mall, which doubles as the green roof of the convention center, are also part of the package.
What happens next is critical to the overall design success of the project, and whether it wins public affection. Additional landscaping on the Mall, now essentially a series of Spartan grass rectangles, will be one of the major public benefits of the project.
For now, it’s highly unlikely for now that either of the new facilities will supplant landmarks such as Severance Hall, the Terminal Tower or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum as beloved symbols of a new Cleveland.
Yet there’s a good deal to admire about the two new buildings. That’s because they reflect compromises and tradeoffs navigated with an eye on a bigger prize: that of helping to complete without serious harm the city’s historic Group Plan District, laid out in 1903 by Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham.
Burnham, the progenitor of America’s City Beautiful movement in city planning, persuaded a half dozen American cities at the turn of the 20th century to bulldoze large portions of their downtowns to make way for clusters of government and civic buildings designed like ancient Greek and Roman classical temples.
The Group Plan District is one of the largest intact examples of the style, and is a national treasure. Its major elements include the three-block Mall, which is framed by Cleveland’s Public Library, City Hall and Board of Education Building, plus the Cuyahoga County Courthouse and the federal Courthouse and Post Office Building, now the Metzenbaum U.S. Courthouse.
In the latest round of construction, a design team led by LMN Architects of Seattle, working for Cuyahoga County and its private sector partner, MMPI Inc., of Chicago, inserted two gigantic structures in the heart of the Group Plan District without substantially changing it.
That’s amazing when you consider that the convention center encompasses a 20-bay truck dock, 230,000 square feet of exhibit space, more than 90,000 square feet of meeting rooms and a 32,000-square foot ballroom.
A collection of ingeniously-designed, back-of-house spaces connect a huge underground kitchen to the ballroom and all the meeting rooms.
Materials throughout the interior, from aluminum handrails and wall panels, to glassy balustrades and backlighted directional signs, look crisp, handsome, durable and high-quality.
Also impressive is the muscular engineering of the gigantic steel “column trees,” spaced 90 feet apart, that support the convention center’s roof.
Yet it’s all virtually invisible from surrounding streets because the new center, like the older, outmoded city-owned facility it replaced, is almost entirely underground and largely invisible to anyone who isn’t actually using it. It’s located beneath the 12.5-acre, grass-covered roof forms that northern two thirds of the Mall.
At Lakeside Avenue, the green roof swoops up 27 feet higher than the sidewalk to reveal a glassy, 300-foot-wide convention center lobby with escalators leading down to the main exhibit floor below.
The lobby appears to erupt from underground, and it interrupts any sense of the Mall as a continuous park extending three blocks from Rockwell Avenue to the northernmost section overlooking Lake Erie. That’s somewhat of a loss for those who remember the Mall in its earlier state.
But to be fair, the insertion of a large exhibition hall beneath the middle section of the Mall in 1964 also elevated the surface of the park above surrounding streets, forever altering Burnham’s concept of a smooth, level space.
The virtue of the upward fold in the new convention center roof is that it creates as an artificial hill that could function as an outdoor amphitheater that offers spectacular new views of Lake Erie and the other sections of the Mall.
From its summit, you get a better sense than ever before of the Mall as a great public space framed by the original Group Plan buildings and the BP America and KeyCorp. skyscrapers, which also overlook the space. The effect is deeply stirring, not the least because it shows how generations of architects who came after Burnham have honored his core idea.
That’s certainly true of the four-story, 235,000 Global Center for Health Innovation, which rises west of the Mall between St. Clair and Lakeside Avenues. It’s a boxy, clunky-looking structure wrapped in an eccentrically patterned skin of precast concrete and glass, with a gigantic, four-story atrium winding facing east onto the Mall.
The building’s unusual window pattern is intended to evoke high-tech images of DNA sequences, but the reference is too subtle to communicate anything other than the idea that the center is a special place unlike downtown’s modern office towers, with their shiny, graph-paper window grids.
The building’s main virtue is that it frames the west side of the Mall in a manner similar to the large, neoclassical Public Auditorium Building on the east side of the space, which is also connected underground to the new convention center.
Like Public Auditorium, the innovation center appropriately plays a supporting role in a larger drama without trying to grab too much attention for itself.
This is not the kind of approach that wins global accolades for wildly original buildings that at best can serve as the logo for an entire city and at worst lead to broken budgets and financially shattered institutions.
But it’s the approach that made sense here. It has left a portion of downtown Cleveland substantially improved — and ready to get even better.
In 2010, Jackson appointed a new Group Plan Commission, comprised of civic and business leaders, to develop plans to enhance the basic landscaping of the Mall, and to find ways to fund the project.
They’re working with consultants from the non-profit Cleveland firm of LAND Studio and landscape architects from the Seattle firm of Gustasfson, Guthrie, Nichols to refine and complete those plans.
LAND Studio and the city’s Downtown Cleveland Alliance, another non-profit group, are working with the leading American landscape architect, James Corner, to develop plans for Public Square predicated on closing Ontario Street as it runs through the square to make it greener and more beautiful. Those plans are being coordinated with the designs for the Mall.
Taken as a whole, the developing ideas for the Mall and Public Square represent the biggest burst of attention to public space in the city in a generation. It has been motivated by the momentum created by the convention and innovation centers, and it’s terrific.
But it can’t stop there. Public space needs love, attention, money and ongoing maintenance. If you’re inviting the world to your doorstep, you had better pave it nicely, power-wash the winter salt, put out some flowers, add lighting, safety patrols and make it all come alive numerous outdoor events.
The successful completion of the convention and innovation centers seems to have triggered a new understanding that it’s never enough to sprinkle a city with great attractions. You have to weave them together with great streets and strong neighborhoods. If the new projects downtown truly ignite that spirit, they will have given the city far more than place to hold conventions.
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