CLEVELAND, Ohio — The big new medical education building in Midtown, built by the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, is sleek and elegant, with a large central atrium, tons of natural light and visually stunning interiors.
Designed by Lord Norman Foster of England, one of the world’s most famous contemporary architects, the building seems ideal for high-tech learning that emphasizes collaboration among future doctors, nurses, physician assistants and dentists.
But is it one big, shiny box too many at the Clinic? That’s how it may seem at first, but the Sheila and Eric Samson Pavilion, which opens for classes this summer, could also be a pivot point to something new.
The four-story, 477,000-square-foot building is a joint project by the Clinic and CWRU, located on jointly owned land at East 93rd Street between Chester and Euclid avenues.
How it will be seen
Despite the dual parentage, the perception will be that the $449 million building – for all its fine architectural qualities – is adding to the chilly gigantism that pervades the Clinic’s 165-acre campus, which can make patients and families feel like tiny cogs in a vast machine.
Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
The Samson Pavilion, which anchors the new CWRU-Cleveland Clinic Health Education Campus is handsomely detailed, but is it one big glass box too many at the Clinic?
Yet when asked whether the Clinic would continue to grow in this manner, Tomislav “Tom” Mihaljevic, the Clinic’s new president and CEO, said he is firmly interested in better integrating the medical center with surrounding city, and in improving community health.
His to-do list includes partnering with a private developer to build a healthy food supermarket in the adjacent low-income, majority black Fairfax neighborhood, which he called “truly a food desert.”
A supermarket may not sound like part of the Clinic’s core mission, but it is for Mihaljevic, a cardiothoracic surgeon who joined the Clinic in 2004 and became its leader last year.
“Eighty percent of the health outcomes in a population are not determined by quality of hospitals,” he said. “From a health perspective, you know, having a grocery store that would enable our communities to have access to healthy food would have a tremendous, tremendous impact.”
The Clinic’s main campus has grown over the past 30 years to become Ohio’s largest employer and the center of a global health care brand with branches in Weston, Florida; Abu Dhabi; and Toronto. London is coming in 2021.
Aware of criticism
Yet Mihaljevic is aware of critiques that the Clinic seems to wall off the city beyond its parking lots, garages and shiny, high-tech buildings linked by overhead walkways.
He said it’s time for the Clinic to ameliorate its standoffishness and to get serious about improving health care in neighborhoods including Fairfax, to the south, and Hough, to the north.
Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
The view from the Health Education Campus: The new building frames views of the Innova Apartments on the north side of Chester Avenue, a vista of a changing, new medical city taking root in Hough and University Circle.
“There is absolutely an opportunity for us to open up the campus and create a flow of our community through the campus in a way that is less threatening and more inviting,” he said.
If there’s one health statistic he wants to improve in Cleveland, it is that of infant mortality, which reached 12 per 100,000 in 2017-18, according to reporting by The Plain Dealer.
“We would like to bring it to levels of the best outcomes we have in the Western and developed world,” he said, without giving a specific number. “This is certainly an imperative for us in Cleveland — to build an environment where young mothers and families are going to be looking to give birth to their children without fearing for their lives.”
Mihaljevic declined to give more details of his plans in a brief interview. But his comments are sure to set expectations for how the Clinic might evolve during his tenure. And his goals align with those of other medical centers showing greater concern for neighborhoods at their doorstep.
Anchors adopting neighborhoods
Under President and CEO Akram Boutros, for example, MetroHealth, the Cuyahoga County health system, is refashioning its 50-acre main campus on West 25th Street as a “hospital in a park.” MetroHealth also wants to help redevelop the surrounding neighborhood, for starters, by building a trio of new apartment buildings.
While the the Samson Pavilion is opening on Mihaljevic’s watch, it embodies the taste for monumental buildings in a minimalist style championed by his predecessor, Delos “Toby” Cosgrove, who headed the Clinic from 2003 to 2017.
Under Cosgrove, Foster completed an internally focused master plan for the Clinic in 2012, into which the Samson Pavilion neatly fits.
It co-houses CWRU’s School of Medicine, School of Dental Medicine, and Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, and the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, another CWRU program.
Chris Connell, the Clinic’s in-house architect, points out that the Clinic has been shifting in recent years toward greater sensitivity to its surroundings.
The Health Education Campus, for example, includes a new, $62 million CWRU dental clinic on the north side of Chester Avenue at East 93rd Street, just north of the Samson Pavilion. The clinic will provide low-cost services to thousands of city residents annually.
Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
The new CWRU dental clinic at the Health Education Campus shared with the Cleveland Clinic is an austere, antiseptic brick box on the north side of Chester Avenue at East 93rd Street.
But the dentistry building, designed by the Cleveland firm of DLR Group/Westlake Reed Leskosky, is an austere box of white brick. A community park built nearby by the Clinic and CWRU at Newton Avenue in Hough is a warm gesture, but it’s too small to signify a bigger shift — at least so far.
Daunting scale
There’s nothing small about Samson. It flanks the east side of the “Grand Allee,” a landscape with a reflecting pool and rows of Arnold Tulip Trees that frame a majestic view of the Clinic’s main entrance at Euclid Avenue.
The big pavilion stands apart from the rest of the Clinic campus on a low rise amid lawns and additional rows of trees like a Greek temple on an acropolis. But its design is thoroughly modern, with a wing-like roof canopy of shimmery stainless steel and sweeping horizontal windows that echo the Midwest horizon.
The exterior is handsomely detailed, though it is not among Foster’s most iconic designs, such as the zig-zagging Hearst Headquarters office tower in New York.
The real drama is inside, where the Samson Pavilion centers on a big central skylighted atrium, named for Cosgrove. It’s a social space for work and gathering, with exposed staircases that zigzag up its sides, and open terraces that step back at the narrower north and south ends.
The atrium is designed to encourage students to think of medicine as a great collective enterprise. The building’s emphasis on natural light acts as a metaphor for clear thinking and connectivity to the outside world.
The Samson Pavilion has an overall visual coolness, but that’s moderated by wood casework and attractive and comfortable furniture, including chairs and worktables in oiled white oak, designed by Foster’s office.
Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
The new Samson Pavilion designed for CWRU and the Cleveland Clinic by Norman Foster is handsome, but also overbearing.
For all its excellence, the Samson Pavilion has an overbearing presence that makes it a potentially troubling statement at a time of skyrocketing health care costs and a bitter national debate over how — or whether — to care for the uninsured.
The Clinic and CWRU have no control over what happens nationally. But if they can promote better teamwork among medical professionals, and heal the city through design and health care, the Samson Pavilion may come to be viewed as a beacon of hope and access instead of a symbol of big medicine. Let’s hope that’s the case.
