At first glance, the Cleveland Foundation’s new Midtown Collaboration Center faintly resembles the boxy, utilitarian look of vacant factories scattered across Cleveland’s struggling neighborhoods.
But echoes of the past end there. The center’s jazzy window patterns and eye-catching façades of red terra cotta panels mark it as a 21st century factory for ideas.
Scheduled for a May 16 grand opening with a community block party from 4 to 7 p.m., the Collaboration Center is a striking project that poses equally striking questions about how philanthropy can best repair a damaged city.
Can the foundation fight poverty, improve public health and nurture new businesses by embedding academic researchers, lenders and artists in a long-challenged neighborhood? Will the Collaboration Center’s design spark new approaches to the city’s challenges?
The foundation is betting on yes.
“Often, when these districts happen, nobody knows what happens inside them. The idea is to change that.’’Lillian Kuri, Cleveland Foundation president and CEO
Located at East 66th Street and Euclid Avenue, the building is a three-story, 100,000 square-foot think-tank, creative studio and community crossroads.
Inside the $32 million structure are satellite programs and offices of 15 tenant and subtenant organizations, including the software developer Hyland, the Cleveland Institute of Art, Case Western Reserve University, Jumpstart, Inc., Assembly for the Arts and the Economic & Community Development Institute, a business micro-lender known as ECDI.
The idea is that putting them all together will spur “creative collisions’’ that benefit long-challenged city neighborhoods, including Hough, said the foundation’s President and CEO Lillian Kuri.
“For me it’s the right kind of messy that’s been missing from the way we’ve been creating projects in our city,’’ she said.
Location, location
The center is the second of eight buildings planned for a $400 million innovation district the foundation wants to develop on 12 acres it bought, cleared and environmentally remediated between Chester and Euclid avenues, and between East 63rd Street and the east side of East 66th.
First came the foundation’s new headquarters, which opened two years ago on the east side of East 66th Street. The 50,000-square-foot building replaced the foundation’s previous longtime home in rented space in Playhouse Square, a location chosen in the 1980s to rally civic energy around saving the city’s theater district from demolition.
The foundation’s move to Midtown is intended to bring new energy to a once fading industrial gray zone between downtown and University Circle, where a residential and commercial revival is gathering momentum.
The location also overlaps with the southern edge of Hough, a majority Black neighborhood still widely known as the site of a violent 1966 uprising sparked by racial injustice.
Hough has taken strides in recent years. Growth at nearby institutions, including the Cleveland Clinic, has sparked housing construction along Chester Avenue. Other new investments include a new branch of the Cleveland Public Library and the city’s partial reconstruction of the historic League Park ballfield.
Designed by the New York firm of S9Architecture with the Cleveland architecture firm of Vocon, the foundation’s new headquarters communicates strength, sustainability and institutional commitment to Hough and Midtown through its chunky geometry, timber framing and warm-looking, cedar-plank facades.
The Collaboration Center, located to the west across East 66th Street, underscores the message by helping to frame a new southern gateway facing into Hough looking north from Euclid Avenue.
Architect Victor Barbalato, the foundation’s newly appointed vice president for real estate, led Vocon’s work on the headquarters and the design of the Collaboration Center in his previous role at the architecture firm.
The foundation, along with area residents, would like to see East 66th Street reconfigured for a mile to the north as a new Black Main Street on the East Side. The city failed twice in recent years to qualify for $10 million or more in federal grants to help realize the “Dream 66’’ project, but the foundation isn’t giving up on the vision.
Activism and design
The foundation’s investment in Midtown and Hough is a dramatic expression of its activist philosophy. Instead of simply awarding grants from its $3.2 billion in assets, the foundation has often launched projects of its own to address community needs.
The emphasis on architecture and planning in the Midtown project are no surprise given that Kuri, who became the foundation’s president and CEO two years ago, is an architect trained at Kent State University and Harvard. She also chairs the city’s planning commission, a post to which she was appointed in 2022 by Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb.
“I am an architect,’’ Kuri said simply and unapologetically in an interview. “It’s the lens through which I see the world.’’
Rip Rapson, who heads Detroit’s Kresge Foundation and who admires Kuri’s leadership, said the Midtown project could become a national model of how a foundation can invest itself, literally, in an urban community in need.
“It’s really extraordinary,’ he said. “It’s almost hard to overstate the way in which Lillian and the [Cleveland] Foundation are light years ahead of other foundations in America.”
Machine for thinking
To paraphrase the 20th century architect Le Corbusier, the Collaboration Center is a machine for thinking, gathering and interacting.
Tenants occupy workspaces clustered around rough-and-ready public areas with concrete floors, open ductwork, and plenty of daylight. The architecture, resembling that of an industrial loft, is unfussy, flexible and at times playful.
The ground floor has a central commons with casual sitting areas and shared meeting rooms of various sizes, plus a whimsical cluster of glassy, closet-size enclosures that resemble classic phone booths of the past. Visitors can hop inside, like Clark Kent before turning into Superman.
Artworks by Cleveland artists including Bruno Casiano, Antwoine Washington and Gina Washington (no relation) contribute to the building’s sense of place and community connection.
Ready for work
Since January, tenants have been moving in and upfitting raw spaces for professional and community use.
Hyland, for example, is transferring high school software classes for up to 500 students a year from its headquarters in Westlake to the center in Hough, which is more easily reachable by students who live in Cleveland.
The Cleveland Institute of Art is spending $13 million to convert 14,300 square feet at the building’s southeast corner into its Interactive Media Lab, which includes a two-story virtual reality studio with LED screens on a curving wall and adjacent floor.
The lab adds academic and technical heft to programs and industrial partnerships based at CIA’s main campus at 11610 Euclid Avenue in the Uptown District.
In Midtown, CIA faculty and students will offer free programs to cultural and educational partners including the Rainey Institute, the Cleveland Public Library’s new Hough Branch, and the Minority Tech Alliance. Summer programs for children organized through the nearby Fatima Family Center will start this summer.
Other ventures at the center include CWRU’s Institute for Population and Community Health, a cancer outreach center, the public health master’s degree program and a center for environmental health.
Built in sociability
The Collaboration Center isn’t all about work. It includes a glassy food-court and live performance venue, the Sixty6 Music Lounge & Studio. All three occupy the glassy north end of the building, facing toward Hough and nearby Chester Avenue.
The dining space is served by Pearl’s Kitchen, led by chef and Cleveland native Tiwanna Scott-Williams, and Black Frog Brewery, a venture of brewmaster and Toledo native Chris Harris. Both are Black entrepreneurs who benefited from loans committed by ECDI, said Nicole Liatos, vice president of entrepreneurial programs at the microlender.
Liatos sees Pearl’s Kitchen and Black Frog as a “way to motivate future entrepreneurs to say, ‘Hey, these individuals look like me, and I'm able to start a business. You could be them.’ ’’
For Kuri, Pearl’s, Black Frog and the Sixty6 Lounge are essential to the mission of the Collaboration Center as a place for people to mix.
“One of the things residents really wanted was to not have to leave the neighborhood to have a place where they felt welcome,’ she said. “There is nowhere else in Midtown right now to grab a beer.’’
As the innovation district grows in the future, Kuri said she wants it to include new buildings with lively ground floor uses, possibly including retail, that add to the public-facing spirit of the Collaboration Center. The foundation’s status as a landowner could help it achieve such a goal.
“Often, when these districts happen, nobody knows what happens inside them,’’ she said. “The idea is to change that.’’
It’s too soon to say whether the Collaboration Center will achieve all of the foundation’s ambitions. But the project’s intentions are clear, and it stands ready to repair at least some of what’s been broken for decades in Hough and other struggling parts of the city. This summer, amid a torrent of divisive political news from Washington, that’s cause for hope.
