Cleveland State arts complex proposed
$50 million project would be on Euclid
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Steven Litt
Plain Dealer Architecture Critic Cleveland State University wants to put the arts front and center on its campus.
A new plan, described publicly by university officials for the first time Monday, calls for moving the studio art and theater programs from a dark, dingy complex at the edge of cam pus to a dra matic new building on a high-visibility site on Euclid Avenue. Facilities for music and dance would also be part of the package.
"This community has built wonderful arts organizations," CSU President Michael Schwartz said. "They're prominent in the life of the community, and they ought to be prominent in the life of the university as well."
The $50 million proposal is part of the university's goal of transforming 10 blocks of Euclid Avenue by lining the street with classrooms, galleries, retail shops and cafes.
"I think Euclid Avenue is going to be totally revitalized in our area," Schwartz said.
The new arts building would replace facilities located in a cluster of renovated brick industrial buildings at East 23rd Street and Chester Avenue, which Schwartz called insufficient, inadequate and inaccessible.
Last summer, the university asked the Cleveland architectural firm Westlake Reed Leskosky to develop conceptual plans for the new facility.
It would rise on the north side of Euclid Avenue between the university's Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, at East 18th Street, and the corner of East 21st Street.
The university would raze the vacant early 20th-century Corlett Building to make way for the arts center.
The proposed facility actually is two structures joined by an overhead walkway and a skylighted underground passage.
Initial plans call for a trio of new theaters on the east side, accompanied on the west by an eight-story rectangular glass tower with galleries, studios, dance floors and a performance space visible from Euclid Avenue.
The theaters would share lobby space with the adjacent Music and Communication Building, just to the north, built in the early 1990s.
The tower would house offices, photo studios and other areas within opaque forms that appear to spiral upward inside the glass. Architect Paul Westlake likened the building's concept to that of a swirling ice cream cone made of different flavors.
"Dairy Queen knows how to do it when they merge the chocolate and vanilla in one big spiral," he said.
Opaque surfaces inside and outside the building could be used as giant projection screens for films and videos visible from the street, Westlake said. In one area, a theater would have a glass facade that could swing open, enabling performances to spill out to the sidewalk.
Jack Boyle, the university's vice president for business affairs and finance, described the arts project as a response to the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority's $200 million Euclid Corridor bus rapid transit line, now under construction.
The transit project, scheduled for completion in 2008, includes dedicated lanes for buses, plus a building-to-building makeover of Euclid Avenue.
"The corridor has to be a catalyst," Boyle said. "We didn't want to miss the opportunity to bring Euclid Avenue back to life."
Other big university projects now in the works along the north side of Euclid include a $55 million Student Union building at East 21st Street, to be finished in spring 2010, and a $35 million building for the College of Education and Human Services, just west of the Mather Mansion, scheduled for completion in August 2009.
The arts building, for which money has yet to be found, would follow the other projects with a construction start in 2010 and completion in 2012 at the earliest, Boyle said.
The university paid for the architectural plans with a $25,000 grant from philanthropist Peter B. Lewis and his former wife, Toby Lewis, two of Cleveland's most visible arts supporters.
The university will use the plans to help raise private money for the project. CSU is close to the limit of what it can borrow in the financial markets through bond issues, Boyle said.
That means that money for future construction projects, including the arts building, will have to be heavily supported by private donations, he said.
Jennifer Frutchy, the Lewises' philanthropic adviser, said they wanted to support the project in its earliest stages but said "it's way too early to say" whether they have more in mind.
Boyle cautioned that the proposal so far is the result of wish lists from various arts departments and will probably be trimmed.
The university might share nearby theaters in Playhouse Square.
"We're not duplicating performance spaces that already exist two blocks away," Boyle said.
Although Westlake Reed Leskosky developed the proposal for the arts complex, it will have to compete for the actual design job when the university follows a state-mandated process for selection of architects, Boyle said.
But Schwartz said he loves the concept, especially the idea of glass-enclosed studios facing Euclid Avenue. He said he's not the least bit concerned if art materials get splattered on the glass.
"That's OK with me, you bet it's OK," he said. "I'm not creating a museum here. It's an art studio."
To reach this Plain Dealer columnist:
slitt@plaind.com, 216-999-4136
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