Cleveland’s civic center is one of the most completely realized examples of the City Beautiful movement in US city planning that flourished during the late 1800s. In 1903, architect/planner Daniel Burnham designed what became known as the Cleveland Mall or Burnham Mall—a large public park flanked by major civic and government buildings on a bluff above Lake Erie. One hundred years later, the new convention center complex continues Burnham’s original vision while reimagining it for the 21st Century, weaving together two public assembly facilities with civic green space to catalyze a dramatic revitalization of the downtown core.

Lined with neoclassical buildings from the early 20th Century, the 600,000-square-foot Mall overlooks the Lake Erie waterfront, adjacent to cultural resources such as the Cleveland Browns Stadium and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Burnham’s site plan links to a system of parks and green spaces extending beyond the bounds of the city, and functions as center point between multiple urban districts.

Redesigning Burham Mall, a major piece of Cleveland’s urban core, meant integrating multiple dimensions of place and experience, in close collaboration with civic leaders, consultants, and landscape architects. Building on extensive research of the ideals and aspirations of Burnham’s vision, the design continues the Mall’s presence as a grand organizing space for the city’s civic life, while finding new ways to activate the space with an ecosystem of user communities. The formal, heavily paved promenades of the 1903 landscape design are replaced by lush vegetation and recreational lawns, with a singular architectural gesture in the form of the “Lakeside Lift”—a subtle but powerful move that creates a raised entrance to the convention center along Lakeside Avenue. The lift functions on several levels: it serves as a block-sized light well for the below-ground exhibition hall; it establishes a strongly defined street presence for the convention center; and creates new vantage points for park goers, offering views of Lake Erie and gathering spaces for events on the lawns.

The new Cleveland Convention Center reuses the excavated footprint of the existing below-ground convention center which sat beneath the Mall. The new  convention center completely transforms the former facility, expanding it to 767,000-square-feet, and featuring raised ceilings and abundant daylighting that reaches into the below-ground meeting and exhibition spaces. A flexible new “City Room” ballroom space looks out to the waterfront.

The interior design of the convention center emphasizes white, clean, bright, and reflective elements, scattering daylight from clerestory windows and light wells to suffuse the below-grade spaces. Daylight, graphics, and color create a wayfinding rhythm throughout the facility. In the ballroom, a floor-to-ceiling window looks out to Lake Erie and the texture of Cleveland's waterfront, forming a living tableau and a privileged experience at the center of the city. Programmable lighting interacts with custom-designed undulating ceiling elements to generate a mood of excitement that changes in character depending on the nature of the event.

Above ground, the new five-story, 235,000-square-foot Global Center for Health Innovation along the west edge of the Mall interfaces with the convention center through a below-ground connection. The first facility of its kind to be integrated with a convention center, the Global Center for Health Innovation provides a permanent showroom for Cleveland’s thriving medical research industry and a year-round anchor tenant for the convention center, adding new possibilities for convention planning and driving economic growth for the Northeast Ohio region.

At the bustling intersection of St. Clair Avenue and Ontario Street, the Global Center for Health Innovation is expressed as a floating solid that hovers above the street, with transparent connections at the ground level interfacing directly with the life of the street and the park. The upper three floors form a unified block of medical showrooms, surrounding a full-height atrium that forms a vast carved opening along the east, park-facing elevation. As a new addition to Burnham’s original plan to frame the Mall with neoclassical civic buildings, the building negotiates vast differences in time as well as scale to unite the Beaux Arts aesthetic sensibility and monumentality of the existing architectural language with the informality and flexibility of the new Mall and smaller scaled surrounding streets. The materiality of the molded pre-cast concrete used for the façade achieves both a sense of permanence and lightness, with varying levels of textural detail.

Given an extremely compressed schedule to produce what would become one of the most iconic elements in the design—the façade system for the Global Center for Health Innovation—LMN turned to its in-house LMN Tech Studio to explore an innovative approach. The group developed a 3D digital model of the façade, using parametric modeling techniques to quickly convert a hand sketch of the window pattern into a set of fabrication-ready glass and precast-concrete panels. Each panel was based on a single repeatable form, allowing all panel types to be created from a small number of molds. The team replicated the concrete casting process at scale, using a 3D printer to print out the basic panel form, then using this as the basis for a plaster mold to generate a complete scale model of the façade. After prototyping and modifying the design, the team was able to deliver a 3D model to fabricators to create CNC machine-built form-liners to cast the panels. From concept through shop drawings, the process was successfully completed in fewer than four months.