Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is nearly ready to build a dramatic new home in University Circle
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
February 08, 2010, 8:34PM
The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, long a foil to the bigger, richer and more conservative Cleveland Museum of Art, is on the verge of a breakthrough.
After renting less-than-visible space for 20 years in the Cleveland Play House complex in Midtown, it's nearly ready to build a dramatic black-glass-and-steel building in University Circle.
MOCA has raised $18 million toward the estimated construction cost of $25 million for the project, designed by internationally renowned architect Farshid Moussavi of London. It also needs another $4 million for an endowment, which means it is still $11 million shy of a $29 million total.
Moussavi flashed images of the design, which clearly aims for iconic status, at an invitation-only summit Friday and Saturday at the Mayfield Country Club, where MOCA convened supporters and civic leaders to brainstorm the institution's future.
"The whole notion is that if MOCA succeeds, we will do things we couldn't have imagined we could do," said Jill Snyder, the museum's director.
The goal of the gathering was simple: How can MOCA catalyze creativity and growth in a shrinking industrial city often more fixated on the past than on the cutting edge?
The answers included:
The two-day event, called "MOCA-mentum," was meant to "elevate the case for the building and elevate the awareness so more people will see this as a critically important project," said Snyder, who has led the museum since 1996.
If the event also helps MOCA raise money, "bring it on," Snyder said.
MOCA was founded in 1968 in University Circle as the small, for-profit New Gallery. It was the first institution in Cleveland to hold regular exhibitions of the leading artists of the day, from Christo to Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Red Grooms.
Today, the museum hosts roughly half a dozen exhibitions a year and draws roughly 20,000 visitors. It does not have a permanent collection, but functions primarily as an exhibit space augmented by extensive public programming.
MOCA has been Cleveland's primary window on global contemporary art, a field lightly touched by the Cleveland Museum of Art. It has produced shows such as the recent survey of contemporary Israeli photography, and the first major U.S. show on the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, held in 2003.
MOCA has also catalyzed developments of global importance. In the mid-1980s, insurance executive Peter Lewis of Progressive Corp. met Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry at the museum.
Lewis bankrolled plans for an unbuilt house by Gehry to the tune of $5 million. That experimental project led to the innovative design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997.
With a more visible and accessible building of its own in University Circle, MOCA expects to draw 50,000 visitors a year, Snyder said.
The museum would be a centerpiece of Case Western Reserve University's $300 million Uptown development, an eight-acre district of retail, restaurants, art, culture and educational facilities stretching from the intersection of Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road east to Little Italy.
Among those who attended the summit at the Mayfield Club were Barbara Snyder, president of CWRU; Tom Schorgl, president and executive director of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture; David Abbott, director of the George Gund Foundation; and Douglas Katz, chef and owner of Fire Food and Drink in Shaker Square.
MOCA invited representatives of The Plain Dealer to attend on the condition that images of the museum's proposed building would not be published.
The museum's board of trustees wants to collect more in cash and pledges before it votes to go ahead, MOCA director Jill Snyder said.
At that point, perhaps in late March, MOCA will go public with its architectural plans, she said.
During the conference, Moussavi outlined the design of the building in a brief presentation intended to spark dialogue about the museum's future, rather than to paint a complete and precise architectural picture.
Indeed, Snyder said, the plans could change as a result of recommendations made at the two-day meeting.
Moussavi, known for path-breaking designs including a revolutionary shipping pier and public park in Yokohama, Japan, showed how she envisions the new MOCA building as a gemlike, four-story structure.
The building would rise from a hexagonal footprint at the corner of Euclid and Mayfield to a square-shaped gallery floor on the top level.
Some facade walls would be vertical, while others would lean outward slightly. One face will likely be fitted out so that movies or videos could be projected against it at night. Another, triangular in shape, would be mostly transparent so it casts a glow toward Euclid Avenue at night.
To reach the art, visitors would flow through a ground level with a shop and multipurpose lobby suitable for lectures and performances.
Stairs would zigzag in a soaring, narrow atrium, leading visitors past a secondary gallery, workrooms and staff offices, to a top-floor gallery that could be reconfigured with movable walls for a variety of exhibition formats.
In an ingenious arrangement, Moussavi stacked regular stairwells directly above fully enclosed fire stairs, which minimizes the area devoted to stairs in the building's interior.
Another innovation is that virtually every space is designed to be subdivided with temporary panels so various portions could be programmed without opening the entire building. MOCA's board and staff envision renting out sections to raise "earned income."
Overall, the building would contain 34,000 square feet of space, a 44 percent increase over the 25,000 square feet MOCA has leased since 1990 at the Cleveland Play House complex. The 9,000 square feet of exhibit space in the new building would be roughly the same as the museum's space at the Play House.
The Play House recently sold the property to the Cleveland Clinic. Under terms of the agreement, MOCA will cut short its lease and vacate the property in late 2011 or summer 2012.
The brainstorming session was facilitated for MOCA by David Cooperrider of CWRU's Weatherhead School of Management. He used his "Appreciative Inquiry" method to encourage sky-high aspirations and to minimize negativity and self-censorship.
The program involved a continuous cycle of small-group work sessions, skits and reports to the entire body.
In the end, MOCA refined more than a dozen action steps, including plans to convene a work session in March with stakeholders in University Circle on how to design the plaza and public spaces around the proposed new MOCA building.
Once MOCA decides to go ahead with the project, it will need about two years to finish the design and construction, Snyder said.
"We want to keep moving forward," she said. "We realize our success will reflect well on everyone else."
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