David Adjaye commissioned to design future of Cleveland's Tower City Center

CLEVELAND, Ohio — We’ve been here before. An ambitious real estate developer or nonprofit entity hires one of the world’s most famous designers to lead a highly visible project in Cleveland. Then, as often as not, the results fall flat.

Cleveland has many fine buildings, some by local architects and some by out-of-towners. But it also has a notable collection of second-best efforts and duds by stars from elsewhere.

That record came to mind earlier this week when Detroit-based Bedrock, the real estate firm associated with Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, announced it was hiring Sir David Adjaye to master plan a massive, 20- to 30-year project to extend the unfinished Tower City Center complex down to the east bank of the Cuyahoga River at Collision Bend.

Adjaye, a London-based architect born in Tanzania, whose firm also has offices in New York and Accra, is one of the world’s leading contemporary architects, and one of the most important Black practitioners in a field that remains predominantly white in the U.S.

After having been knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2016, Adjaye last year became the first Black architect to win the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an honor also approved by the queen.

Adjaye is most famous in this country for having designed the Smithsonian Institution’s highly acclaimed National Museum of African American History and Culture, completed in 2016 on the Washington, D.C., Mall.

The architect Sir David Adjaye has won acclaim for his design for the National Museum of African-American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington DC. The Plain Dealer

His signature style is based on a reverence for modernism and its global mutations, particularly in Africa. His work features monumental sculptural forms carved by dramatic openings, the poetic use of light, and the innovative and masterful use of materials.

Adjaye’s projects have ranged from houses for wealthy celebrities and art collectors to outstanding public housing complexes, museums, libraries, and cultural facilities. Blair Kamin, the former architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, wrote that Adjaye has been able to design “for both the A-list and the downtrodden.”

So, yes, it’s a big deal that Bedrock is bringing Adjaye to town. It bespeaks a high level of ambition on the part of Gilbert, and Kofi Bonner, Bedrock’s CEO, a native of Ghana, and a veteran developer and former executive vice president and chief administrative officer of the Browns from 1998 to 2004.

It’s also tantalizing that Bonner said Adjaye could design a “building or buildings” along the riverfront, in addition to the master plan.

But when it comes to architectural stars, Cleveland has a mixed history. Cesar Pelli’s Key Tower and Crile Building at the Cleveland Clinic could be counted among his best work, but other works by big-name architects haven’t always hit that mark.

A list of Cleveland’s architectural also-rans is worth fighting over, but arguably it would include I.M. Pei’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; Frank Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building at Case Western Reserve University; Harrison & Abramovitz’s Erieview Tower; Gyo Obata’s BP Building, now 200 Public Square; Hugh Stubbins’s One Cleveland Center; and a trio of downtown towers designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill.

The architecture of I.M. Pei's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame creates dynamic compositions of solids and voids when viewed from the waterfront promenade that edges North Coast Harbor in downtown Cleveland. Steven Litt, The Plain DealerSteven Litt, The Plain Dealer

To be fair, the Rock Hall and the Lewis Building are pretty special, but they also suffered from changes in their intended location and site configuration, which diminished the original visions of their architects.

The city’s record in master planning — the design of urban districts that develop over long periods of time — is also mixed.

The Group Plan District, the city’s government and civic center, laid out in 1903 by a team led by Daniel Burnham, is full of monumental neoclassical buildings that do little to activate the grand central Mall they surround.

The neighboring Erieview urban renewal district, designed in 1961 by Pei long before his Rock Hall, took decades to fill in with modernist towers and garages surrounded by sterile streetscapes.

Given that record, the question naturally arises: will Adjaye give us his best?

The architect was not available for an interview, but Bonner vowed in an interview with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer that Adjaye will come through.

“I will demand nothing less than his full attention,’’ Bonner said. “I know how sought-after he is. That’s good for him; he has a great practice, and is very discerning now about the opportunities he actually accepts.”

Bonner went on to say, “I specifically called him and said, ‘Look I would love for you to do this, but I need you to be integral to this design process. If you can do it, that would be fabulous. And if you can’t, I understand and God bless you, you’re doing great.’ "

Bonner said that Adjaye “assured me he would personally pay attention, and personally I can hold him to it because I know where he lives.”

Bonner’s connection to Adjaye is based on a close friendship that included working together in 2016-2017 on a master plan for redeveloping the 420-acre Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco when Bonner was the chief operating officer for San Francisco-based FivePoint Holdings.

The Tower City project will require Adjaye and Bonner’s best efforts because of its enormous potential, and the extensive complexities that have stymied previous development efforts.

Centering on the graceful spire of the Terminal Tower, Tower City Center is a five-block, 63-acre “city within a city’' planned on the southwest corner of Public Square in the late 1920s by developers Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen, who built a vast railroad and real estate empire that collapsed in the Depression.

Tower City Center, viewed from Huron Road looking east. (Marvin Fong / The Plain Dealer) The Plain DealerThe Plain Dealer

Most of Tower City’s buildings and streets rest on platforms erected over the sloping ground underneath, which descends to the riverbank.

Forest City Enterprises added two office towers to the complex and revamped the former Union Terminal as the now tired-looking Avenue mall in the 1980s.

The western edge of Tower City, overlooking the riverfront, remains unfinished. It ends abruptly with the rusting girders and columns holding up Huron Road, which looms over shadowy garages below Tower City’s buildings, and surface parking lots that slope down to the water.

The city and various property owners have discussed extending Tower City to the water’s edge for at least 30 years. The only fruit of those efforts is the Carl Stokes U.S. Courthouse Tower. Built in 2002 along Huron Road just south of Superior Avenue, it’s a decent effort by the Boston-based architecture firm Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood.

The 23-story federal courthouse tower stands as the only realized portion of an ambitious proposal in Cleveland’s Civic Vision 2000 and Beyond, the citywide plan completed in 1988 under former mayor George Voinovich and former planning director Hunter Morrison.

A photo of an early model by I.M. Pei showing the Rock Hall in its original proposed location behind Tower City Center overlooking the Cuyahoga River. Plain Dealer File.Plain Dealer file

That plan called for inserting a row of office towers between Huron Road and the river, with Pei’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the center.

Pei conceived the Rock Hall’s big glass lobby as a defiant gesture aimed diagonally up toward the Terminal Tower. Of course, that juxtaposition was never realized; the Rock Hall landed at North Coast Harbor in 1995 with its big glass lobby facing southeast, away from the city’s skyline, and its main tower trimmed to fit under the flight path for nearby Burke Lakefront Airport.

In 2003, Forest City Enterprises proposed shoehorning a new convention center between Huron Road and the riverfront like a giant refrigerator lying on its side. Gilbert, who by then owned the NBA Cavaliers, endorsed the location, if not the design.

In 2010, after broadening his involvement with Cleveland, Gilbert proposed building a $600 million casino on the riverfront site.

After first converting the former Higbee’s department store at Tower City into what is now known as the Jack Casino, Gilbert reiterated in 2014 that he wanted to build a bigger casino on the riverfront. But nothing came of that proposal, either.

Undiscouraged, Gilbert came forward last year with a fresh vision that holds far more appeal than building a casino along the Cuyahoga. Bedrock released a flashy if generic-looking rendering of boxy towers stepping down to the river from Huron Road. The image suggested big possibilities for apartments, retail, offices, and public spaces. but no particular direction in terms of design quality.

A rendering of a vision for the Cuyahoga River riverfront.

The rendering also suggested that Bedrock would acquire some or all of the riverbank land adjacent to Tower City owned by Sherwin-Williams Co., which is building a new headquarters skyscraper downtown and moving its riverfront research and development facility to Brecksville.

In an email Friday, Bonner dismissed any speculation or rumors about the Sherwin-Williams properties.

“Along or adjacent to the Cuyahoga riverfront, Bedrock owns approximately 30 acres, including Tower City Center, and we anticipate Sir David’s plan to comprise this footprint,” he said.

At this point, Bonner said that he and Adjaye, and a design team that also includes Cleveland’s Osborn Engineering, are in early stages of discovery and are still learning about the riverfront site.

Bonner said he’d push Adjaye to come up with a preliminary vision within 90 to 100 days, and that he anticipates bringing ideas to the public for comment through a process managed by Mayor Justin Bibb’s development and planning departments.

Any proposal would dovetail with recommendations in the city’s recently completed Vision for the Valley plan, which calls for a mixed-use development on the riverfront, with extensive public spaces that could include waterfront promenades and a staircase or terraces descending from Huron Road to the river on a straight-line axis centered on the Terminal Tower.

Bonner said the company would also look at the long-discussed possibility of bringing the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad north from the Cuyahoga Valley National Park into Tower City Center.

Something should be said here about race, an important factor worth noting in Bedrock’s project.

The Van Sweringens’ once-formidable real estate empire included Shaker Heights, the garden city-style suburb that imposed restrictive covenants in property deeds that have been widely interpreted as intended to bar sales to Blacks, Jews, and Italians.

Despite continuing racial injustices in the U.S., it’s a mark of how far Cleveland and the nation have come that the photo released by Bedrock with the announcement of Adjaye’s engagement with the Tower City project focused on three Black men: Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Bonner, and Adjaye.

(From left), David Adjaye, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb and Bedrock CEO Kofi Bonner pose for a photo.Bedrock

Bibb is the city’s fourth Black mayor. What’s unusual in the photo is the presence of a prominent Black developer and an internationally renowned Black architect.

It’s a team that would have shocked the Van Sweringens, and it raises the possibility that the Tower City project could dramatize for minority children in a city whose population is more than 50% Black that they too could one day shape the future of a city.

The photo also resonates with the story of Robert P. Madison, the revered Cleveland architect who fought bigotry in the 1950s and ‘60s to become Ohio’s first registered Black architect, and one of the most influential architects in the city’s history. The Madison firm carries on today under his niece-in-law, architect Sandra Madison.

“Do I know that there are broader implications around the picture?’’ Bonner said. “Yes. But to me, the most important thing is that we deliver. The execution is going to speak way more loudly than a picture.”

He’s right about that.

Bedrock’s riverfront project has enormous potential to do good for the city, but only if Adjaye can establish a vision strong enough to set a pattern worth following for decades to come and perhaps design a great building or two of his own for Cleveland.

If Adjaye and Bonner can do those things, they will have added enormously to Cleveland’s future. Let’s hope that happens.

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