It’s a sad comment about contemporary architecture that few of the spectacular buildings that have grabbed headlines in recent decades are schools for elementary or secondary students.
There’s no reason why new schools can’t be as exhilarating and as inspiring as reading Shakespeare, translating a tough passage in Latin or tackling advanced problems in science and math. And there’s no reason why America’s next great piece of school architecture can’t happen right here in downtown Cleveland.
These and other impulses motivated this year’s version of the Cleveland Design Competition, an international contest aimed at generating concepts to solve important architectural challenges in the city — projects for which construction money hasn’t yet been found.
The 2011 competition, for which winners were announced Aug. 19, focused on ideas for the Campus International School in downtown Cleveland, a collaborative project of the Cleveland Municipal School District and Cleveland State University.
The takeaway from this year’s entries is that the competition didn’t elicit a single, powerful solution capable of rallying a strong push to get it built. It’s unclear whether that’s a reflection of the complexity of the assignment or the skills of the designers who participated.
Nevertheless, the 92 entries in the competition, which came from 20 countries around the world, simmer with good ideas.
Along with predictable exercises in architectural pyrotechnics, the proposals included the sensible notion of treating the school as a campus, which could add individual buildings in phases as it grows as well as the idea of embedding the school in a landscape of undulating green roofs and reflecting pools.
The international school, one of 17 Innovative Schools envisioned in the academic turnaround plan conceived by former Cleveland schools CEO Eugene Sanders, opened in August 2010 in temporary rented quarters in the First United Methodist Church at East 30th Street and Euclid Avenue.
The school, which had an enrollment of 126 in grades K-2 in its first year, is expected to grow by about 60 to 70 students a year as it chooses from a pool of applicants by lottery for each new class of entering kindergartners. It reserves 65 percent of its openings for children from Cleveland, 20 percent for families affiliated with CSU and 15 percent for children from Cleveland suburbs.
The school follows a curriculum developed by the International Baccalaureate foundation of Bethesda, Md., to serve children of diplomats moving from country to country.
Principal Julie Beers anticipates that the school will occupy at least one more temporary rented home before needing to settle in a permanent home of its own in coming years. There is no timetable for construction, nor has funding been identified. The school district will likely seek private money for the project, but Beers has said there are no immediate plans to pursue the project.
Nevertheless, CSU has identified a potential site for the school on the downtown blocks bounded by Superior and Payne avenues and by East 18th and East 21st streets, minus the existing Tower Press loft apartment building.
The city’s 1920s-era 3rd District Police Station, at Payne Avenue and East 21st Street, which the city has contemplated closing, was included in the competition as a structure that could be renovated as part of a new school campus.
Selected designs from the competition will be exhibited publicly during the upcoming 2011 Ingenuityfest, from Friday, Sept. 16, to Sunday, Sept. 18, on the lower level of the Detroit-Superior (Veterans Memorial) Bridge, incidentally the focus of next year’s design competition.
All 92 designs will be shown from Monday Sept. 26, to Saturday, Oct. 29, in the Colonial Arcade, 530 Euclid Ave.
The stronger concepts in the competition included that of a sleek, contemporary complex of glassy pavilions and flat roofs set amid broad plazas and reflecting pools, designed by Vincent Feld of Paris. The visually crisp proposal looks as if it could be built tomorrow, although it wasn’t among the most architecturally innovative offerings.
The awards jury, which included architect Kevin Daly of Santa Monica, Calif., Steven Turckes of Chicago, David Mark Riz of Philadelphia and Ed Schmittgen, CSU’s campus planner, split the competition’s $1,000 third-place award between Feld and a team from the Kharkov, Ukraine, firm of Drozdov & Partners.
The latter team suggested submerging most of the school campus under a field, suggesting a primal patch of Midwestern prairie.
The first prize of $5,000 went to Michael Dickson of Brisbane, Australia, who envisioned a campus of multistory buildings devoted to various grade levels, punctuated with green quadrangles.
The second prize of $2,000 went to Michael Robitz, Sean Franklin and Alexandra VanOrsdale of New York, who ignored the site selected for the project and instead suggested that the new school be built in an archetypal working-class Cleveland neighborhood from recycled, foreclosed houses. The jury apparently highlighted the design to be provocative.
Nevertheless, the concepts — from conventional to outlandish — show that CSU and the school district should explore a wide range of options rather than capitulate to the dull formulas imposed by the Ohio Schools Facilities Commission, which administers the state-supported school-construction program that has added new schools to cities across the state.
As this year’s competition has demonstrated, raising architectural standards in Cleveland is hard work. The city has a decades-long case of low self-esteem, which too often persuades developers, institutions and government agencies to aim low.
The organizers of the design competition refuse to go along — and they deserve enormous credit for trying to elevate local aspirations. They are Michael Christoff of the architecture and interior design firm Vocon, and Bradley Fink of Westlake Reed Leskosky. Both have yet to complete their architectural license exams, yet they have made a big contribution to civic life.
The competition’s supporters, including the leading sponsor, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., deserve a salute for bankrolling the contest, which costs about $25,000 a year.
Bit by bit, the competition is reaching a wider audience among young designers around the world. And bit by bit, it’s raising expectations about the level of creativity Cleveland ought to expect from new buildings and urban spaces around the city.