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A Hands-On Education
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It’s easy to imagine people putting their hands on the building, as if to gauge its heft and assure themselves that the shimmering structure won’t whirl away in a good wind. From his office across the street in the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Jerry Floersch doesn’t have to imagine. The assistant professor has seen them do it. The touches, he says, are intentional. People walk up and get tactile with the place. The new Weatherhead School of Management home, designed by Frank Gehry, was dedicated in October. We offer a tour in our feature story “Landmark Occasion.” Practically from the moment the celebrated architect’s first squiggly lined drawings emerged more than four years ago, people intensely debated the building’s design—including in this magazine. They exalted it. They excoriated it. They did everything in between. Now that the building’s sculptural contours have taken their place at the corner of Bellflower Road and Ford Drive, the talk continues. In September, Steven Litt, architecture critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wrote: “It’s the most stunningly gorgeous avant-garde building in the city’s history.” Not everyone would agree. Regardless of their opinion, though, observers can come together on one point: This building attracts people. Already it has been photographed more often than Marilyn Monroe. (I’m exaggerating. I think.) Even when it was crawling with construction workers, during the cold Cleveland winters, visitors came expressly to see it. The Cleveland Orchestra, in a September concert, presented the world première of “Rocks Under the Water,” a work by French composer Marc-André Dalbavie that was created in tribute to the building. The school is running docent-led tours on weekends. Think about that. An academic building that people want to tour. Architecture has this power. It also has the power to elevate the people who use it. If the Weatherhead School has hit its mark, the striving, break-with-tradition Peter B. Lewis Building will help bring out the most creative thinking in generations of new students. That’s been the idea all along. Another goal of the design was to promote interaction among the people who use the Lewis Building. As for promoting interaction with the building itself? Good design does that. It’s probably not often, however, that such interaction extends to exploring the outside of the building through touch. But one look at this building, with its improbably curving brick and swooping steel, suggests that hands-on interaction is a natural. A colleague of mine says the building begs to be touched. Sometimes eyes are not enough.  Ken Kesegich, editor kxk7@po.cwru.edu Photograph by Michael Sands, CWRU. |
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