Cleveland architect Jonathan Kurtz made a bold move 10 years ago when he gave up a high-level job with the prestigious local architecture firm of Westlake Reed Leskosky to set up his own shop.
He left shortly before the Westlake firm’s merger with DLR Group, a global design company with 30 offices worldwide.
“I turned down a great deal of financial security by going on my own,’’ Kurtz said in a recent interview at his office, a rehabbed former factory building on Carnegie Avenue in Midtown. He said he was thinking at the time, “If I never do this, I'll never know what I can create.’’
A decade later, Kurtz says his tiny startup, which has five employees including himself and his wife, Carla Kurtz, the firm’s studio manager, has worked on more than 60 assignments with a total value of roughly $150 million.
Through the years, he’s won more than 50 regional and national design awards, including more than 10 since he went independent. His honors include the 2012 Cleveland Arts Prize Emerging Artist Award for Design.
Despite its small staff, Kurtz’s firm is having an outsized impact. The architect, now 48, is helping to rejuvenate important parts of the region’s cultural infrastructure with finely crafted spaces for learning and performance that have a striking contemporary edge, but not a predictable signature look.
A good listener
Clients praise Kurtz for listening closely to their needs and then delivering on what he's heard.
That’s true, for example, of the new home of the nonprofit Cleveland Print Room, which provides resources for enthusiasts of traditional darkroom photography and printing.
Formerly located in Cleveland’s ArtCraft Building on Superior Avenue, The Print Room is moving to a rehabbed commercial laundry building on Lexington Avenue. Kurtz’s design calls for new interiors and a more inviting exterior, with new expanses of glass replacing formerly bricked-up windows. The $10 million project is due for completion later this year, said Print Room Director Kerry Davis.
“So many things we discussed stayed in and showed up in the design,” he said.
Davis described Kurtz as “quiet and thoughtful, and I do think it shows up in his work in that there’s a level of detail present in the finished product.’’
The description fits. In person, Kurtz is soft-spoken and pensive. His clear-rimmed glasses give him an air of quiet intellectuality, but his sturdy physique befits his record as a star quarterback at Lake High School in Uniontown, where his record of 198 passing completions for 1992-94 stood until 2020. He later earned an athletic scholarship at Walsh University in North Canton as the first member of his family to attend college.
From British Columbia to Harvard
Kurtz brings an unusual background to his work. He was the seventh of eight children and was born after his parents moved to northern British Columbia in Canada in the mid 1970s to live in a Mennonite farming community with several other families.
“I was born in a one-room cabin that had no running water, no electricity,’’ he said. “We were 90 miles from the closest town, and so we weren't going to a hospital.’’
By the time he was three, Kurtz’s family was back in Hartville, between Akron and Canton, where he later tagged along with his father on home repair jobs.
“I'd go out to work with him and pull pumps or change boilers and do duct work and solder pipes,’’ Kurtz said.
Before starting his junior year at Walsh, Kurtz gave up dreams of becoming a pro football player because he said that at 6 feet and 190 pounds, he was too small. Given his interest in math and art, he decided to study architecture and transferred to Kent State University, where he earned a bachelor of architecture degree with honors in 2001.
He followed up at Harvard, earning a master’s degree in architecture with distinction in 2004. At the time, KSU professor and mentor Thom Stauffer flagged Kurtz as a potential hire by Westlake Reed Leskosky, where he became a principal in his 30s.
A growing portfolio
When he went independent, Kurtz launched his new practice in the basement of his Cleveland Heights home before moving to rented space. In 2023, he took over the factory on Carnegie Avenue, where previous owners included manufacturers of machine parts, and, later, paintbrushes.
The 13,000-square-foot building has a cathedral-like quality. It mixes the sleek, inserted forms of a conference room, kitchen and drafting workstations with rugged masonry bearing witness to the building’s industrial past.
Notable recent projects undertaken by Kurtz include the new, $21.9 million Martin Luther King Jr. Branch of the Cleveland Public Library, which opened early last year. He collaborated on the design with the New York firm of SO-IL (which stands for Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu).
Last fall, the Cleveland Institute of Music completed a $22 million renovation Kurtz designed for Kulas Hall, its main auditorium.
The original space, completed in the mid-1960s, had bright, white walls and complicated folds and baffles that created odd, uneven sound reflections.
The new interior is darker and cleaner looking, with notes of bronze and dark teal that focus the eye on a luminous stage with improved sightlines. Kurtz calls the renovated hall “an opulent cave.’’
The space is easier on the eye than the original, and, most importantly, it’s winning praise for its improved acoustics.
“Audience members have just been raving about what it’s like to hear everything from operas to solos,’’ Paul Hogle, CIM’s president and CEO, said of Kurtz’s work at Kulas. “Performers are all praising it for its warmth, its evenness of tone, for the way they think it adds to their musical voice rather than them fighting against it.’’
From Oberlin to Columbus
Other assignments include the new Conservatory East Studios at Oberlin College, which house the Oberlin Conservatory’s new Music Theater program. The project inserted rehearsal and classroom spaces in 9,000 square feet of vacant retail space on the ground floor of The Hotel at Oberlin.
With floor-to-ceiling windows facing the East College Street sidewalk, the studios create a metaphorical connection between the arts and the Oberlin community, and in a larger sense, between town and gown.
“He understands us, he understands the ethos, he understands what we're trying to achieve,’’ William Quillen, dean of the Oberlin Conservatory, said of Kurtz. “Educationally and artistically, he speaks our language and vice versa.’’
The music theater studios were an encore following earlier work completed while Kurtz was employed at the Westlake firm, including the eye-catching $24 million Kohl Building, a center for jazz studies and programs in composition, musicology and music theory, completed in 2010.
At Park Synagogue, an iconic mid-century modern masterpiece in Cleveland Heights by German-Jewish architect Erich Mendelssohn, Kurtz is designing a renovation of the main sanctuary as a performance space.
The project is part of an effort led by Cleveland-based Sustainable Community Associates to turn the synagogue campus into Park Arts, a cultural, educational and residential community. Programs will be offered there by Oberlin College and other nonprofits.
In Columbus, Kurtz is designing a renovation of the entrance lobby and public spaces at another architectural icon: The Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, designed in the late 1980s by the leading American architect, Peter Eisenman.
Changing of the guard
As he nears 50, Kurtz is still relatively young for a profession in which it can take decades to earn the confidence of major clients.
Kurtz is also part of a newer generation of locally-based designers participating in a regional changing of the guard. Cleveland architecture was dominated from the 1970s to the early 2000s by figures including the late Peter van Dijk, designer of Blossom Music Center, and Robert P. Madison, co-designer with I.M. Pei of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
Since then, other Cleveland firms, such as Vocon, which has offices in New York and Chicago, have grown to prominence. Other legacy firms have transitioned to leadership by younger principals.
With his emphasis in arts and culture, Kurtz occupies a special niche within the region’s design ecology. But he has ambitions to grow beyond Northeast Ohio. For example, he entered a competition to design an expansion for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
No matter what he does, Kurtz wants to focus on design as opposed to financial concerns.
He defined design as the ability to “craft spaces that are qualitatively different, that allow people to see, ‘somebody thought about this; somebody cares about it; there's an intentionality here.’ ”
Looking back on his decision to strike out on his own as an architect, Kurtz said, “I wanted to kind of, in a way, control my own destiny.’’
So far, it seems, he is, and the region is benefiting.
