Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland is collaborating

Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland is collaborating with two local developers, MRN Limited Partnership and Zaremba Inc., to create a $150 million arts, retail, and residential development on 8.5 acres at University Circle, the city’s education and cultural center. Anchored by the new Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and an expansion of the Cleveland Institute of Art, the University Arts and Retail District would contain more than 200 residential condominium units, 50 units of student housing, 100,000 to 225,000 sq. ft. of retail and restaurant space, and 500 to 1,200 parking spaces. Neighborhood residents have been unhappy about what they see as the university’s past failure to consult adequately with people living nearby. Consequently the city is moving toward establishing a design review body for a one-square-mile area at University Circle. Alas, the future museum is to be designed by Foreign Office Architects (FOA) of London, whose architecture, according to the Design Museum in England, “lifts flaps of skin from the ground, and mutates them in contorted twists, like plastic surgery for the earth’s surface.” At FOA, “all sorts of other freakish shapes are bubbling up in frothing computers, to be grafted onto the world,” the Design Museum said. How the Museum of Contemporary Art will in any way reinforce the urbanism of the MRN and Zaremba remains to be seen. Strange shapes are not usually the ingredients from which effective urbanism is made.