Cleveland Art Institute Mvrdv

CLEVELAND ART INSTITUTE mvrdv

FACTS Location : Cleveland, OH, USA Year : 2007-2008 Client : Cleveland Institute of Art Program : 5.000 m2 Art Gallery, including studio space, galleries, auditorium and offices Budget : Undisclosed

ABOUT Lately many cities are commissioning and building eye-catching Museums of Arts. Each museum aims to draw attention, even leading to some competition between museums. Architecture plays a significant role in this development. It is one of the outspoken visual ways to show the museum to the world, and advertise its function as a public place. Its interiors act as the ultimate stage set for the art, balancing between modesty that serves the art and exuberance that complements the art. Many building styles have been explored: anywhere from modest white buildings to sculptural buildings to ‘animistic’ buildings. The project scope includes the remodeling of the current Institute of Art (the historic McCullough Building) and the construction of an adjacent expansion. The integration of the historic structure is crucial. The program for the existing building includes a Future Design Center, exhibition spaces, student services, computer facilities, conference rooms and offices. The new expansion accommodates an auditorium, gallery spaces and administration office spaces. A minimum of LEED silver is required. The proposal is to extend the warehouse with another warehouse, following the structure and rhythm of the historic building, a slab of four layers along the un-attractive former backside of the historic building which is covered by the new addition. Near the ends are elevator cores and stairs that connect the floors, in-between the cores long column free spaces, ideal spaces for arts and flexible for future change. In order to accommodate the main entrance and to add character to the building it curves in a wave over the main entrance. This wave creates efficiently two auditoriums on the ground floor, located perfectly at the entrance allowing large crowds easy access. On the three upper floors the wave creates an exciting environment to study and work, the terraced floors allow for multiple arrangements, from open plan offices to office cells, connected by a series of stairs and wheelchair ramps. Avoiding to become a competition for the historic building the extension keeps at its extremes a respectful distance to the historic structure and approaches it towards the centre, emphasizing its middle with the main entrance. Except for a bridge on the highest point of each floor the two buildings never touch. The extensions exterior is an echo of the historic buildings rhythm and respectfully sober at the outer ends where it is close to the historic façade. At its long side the wave adds character to the extension, providing for a clear main entrance and allowing the interiors’ variety whilst being highly functional.

The goal for the addition to the McCullough Center is to create rugged, flexible studio spaces in an environment that can be quickly reconfigured as artistic practices and technologies change in the 21st century and to encourage interdisciplinary thinking. The CIA did not ask for a new identity but for a project that responded to its identity and integrated the much loved historic building in a respectful way.

CREDITS Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries Fokke Moerel, Bart Millon, Joao Amaro

Partners: Co-architect / Facility Office: Burt Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Structure: Barber Hoffman, Columbus, OH, USA Management: The Ferchill Group, Cleveland, OH, USA Costing: Davis Langdon, NY, USA

http://www.mvrdv.nl/en/projects/367_cleveland_institute_of_art/# Blending humor, simplicity and bridgelike engineering, the Cleveland Institute of Art expansion envisioned by Dutch architect Winy Maas hunches up in the middle like a giant inchworm or caterpillar.

The Cleveland Institute of Art added momentum to the revitalization ofUniversity Circle Friday by unveiling plans for the $53 million expansion and renovation of its McCullough Center on upper Euclid Avenue.

The four-year art college has raised nearly half the money for the project in cash, pledges and tax credits and hopes to break ground in May, said David Deming, the school's president. "We're excited, we really are excited," he said. "It's very gratifying to arrive at this moment. It's something the faculty, administration and trustees have been trying to figure out for 20 years." When the project is finished in 2009, the art institute will vacate its aging and outmoded Gund Building at 11141 East Blvd., opposite the Cleveland Museum of Art, and sell or lease the property for uses that could include a luxury condominium. The expansion of the McCullough Center, in effect, will unify the art institute in a single campus for the first time since 1981. The art institute project, designed by architect Winy Maas of the leading Dutch architecture firm MVRDV, will anchor the eastern edge of Case Western Reserve

University's $300 million Triangle development, also called the University Arts and Retail District. The goal of the Triangle is to create a vibrant new residential, cultural and retail zone. The 8.5-acre development will be anchored by the art institute expansion on the east and on the west by a new building for the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. "There's a whole district-in-waiting that's just going to be lit up by MOCA and CIA," said Chris Ronayne, director of the nonprofit University Circle Inc. "These are all iconic assets that will breathe life into the neighborhood." The art institute's expansion, to be built by developer John Ferchill, will add a new 80,000-square-foot structure designed by Maas to the west side of the Joseph McCullough Center for the Visual Arts at 11610 Euclid Ave. The art institute has occupied the building, a former Ford Model T factory, since 1981. The McCullough Center will be renovated with new galleries, classrooms, studios and a library. The expansion next door will be a long, low, rectangular box framed in glass and steel. It will arch up in the middle like a gigantic inchworm to create a covered entrance. An auditorium, cafe and classrooms will be located on terraced floors above the arch. Deming called the Maas design a creative reinterpretation of the McCullough Center. He's confident it will be approved by the Ohio Historic Preservation Office and theU.S. Department of the Interior for roughly $11 million to $13 million in state and federal tax credits. The credits are critical to the project. The art college has raised an equivalent amount in cash and pledges, and is confident it can raise a similar amount by this winter. That would bring funding to 75 percent of the project's cost, the goal set by trustees for the go-ahead, Deming said.