Architects designed the Global Center for Health Innovation to fit seamlessly with Cleveland's new convention center - cleveland.com

It may perform brilliantly as a showplace of medical devices and technology and as a magnet for health-related conventions, or its economic impact may land somewhere south of expectations.

However things turn out for Cleveland’s new Global Center for Health Innovation, which will have its official ribbon-cutting Tuesday, it represents an attempt by its architects to create an easily navigable exhibit center linked seamlessly with the new underground convention center it abuts.

The architects wanted their building to fit smoothly into the urban landscape of Cleveland's historic Group Plan District, to be flooded with natural light and to be filled with subtle symbolism based on medical science.

The four-story atrium of the Global Center for Health Innovation captures a big slice of Cleveland sky.

Above all, the spatial flow between the Global Center and the convention spaces below is what mattered.

“We look at it all as one thing,” architect Rafael Vinoly, the lead designer of the project for LMN Architects of Seattle, said of the Global Center and the below-ground convention center. “Even though perceptually it may look like two, the building is functionally one unit.”

In other words, the Global Center is simply the above-ground portion of the new convention center, which is largely tucked beneath the northern two blocks of the city’s 12.6-acre downtown Mall.

Visitors entering the four-story atrium lobby of the Global Center at St. Clair Avenue are guided by a gently sloping ramp down to escalators that lead directly to the convention center’s registration area beneath the Mall.

From an overlook at the foot of the escalators, one can see directly into the vast convention exhibit areas below, and back up to the Global Center’s atrium above. No one should ever need breadcrumbs to retrace their path.

The overlook is also steps away from service elevators linked to the convention center’s loading docks, which also serve the Global Center.

Wall panels nearby could be knocked out to provide connections to the proposed convention hotel Cuyahoga County aims to develop on the site of its aging administration building just to the north.

All of these connection points are intentional, and are central to Vinoly’s desire to make the Global Center intuitively navigable.

Formerly known as the Medical Mart, the Global Center is a four-story, 235,000-square-foot building. The structure’s U-shaped upper floors contain exhibit spaces that flank three sides of a 76-foot-high atrium, which faces east toward the big green Mall.

An Au Bon Pain cafe is tucked into the southwest corner of the Global Center for Health Innovation at the corner of St. Clair Avenue and Huron Road.

Apart from the atrium, spaces on the building’s ground floor include an 11,000-square-foot “junior” ballroom, not to be confused with the far bigger ballroom in the convention center.

The upper three levels, where tenants are installing exhibits, offices and meeting spaces, feature 15-foot ceilings and large, open spaces flooded by daylight from the atrium on the building’s east side, and from windows on the other three facades.

For Vinoly, not to be confused with his more famous uncle of the same name, who designed the $350 million expansion and renovation of the Cleveland Museum of Art, any understanding of the Global Center has to begin with the downtown Mall.

“The main imperative is that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build on the edge of that civic Mall,” he said.

The Mall matters because it’s the heart of the 1903 Group Plan for Cleveland, a famous legacy of Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham.

Burnham, a charismatic, cigar-chomping, blue-eyed man with a walrus mustache, is famous for having enjoined his contemporaries to “make no little plans.” He masterminded the “White City” vision for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the 1909 plan that gave the city its famous lakefront.

In 1903, he and other designers envisioned a downtown civic and government center for Cleveland with neoclassical government buildings organized around the three-block Mall, stretching from Rockwell Avenue to a train station overlooking Lake Erie.

The train station never got built, but the rest of the Group Plan filled out during the first three decades of the 20th century with the city’s public library, City Hall, federal building and post office and county courthouse.

The Global Center replaced a mongrelized collection of structures on the west side of the Mall that included a bland, multistory, modern-style office tower, the popular if scruffy Sportsman’s Restaurant, and an aging, two-story parking garage.

Precast concrete panels on the facade of the Global Center for Health Innovation appear to undulate in raking sunlight.

Given the chance to buildi something new on the Mall. Vinoly said he knew his building had to fit harmoniously with the earlier neoclassical structures.

“We wanted to be respectful of the general massing and materiality of the existing buildings,” he said.

For that reason, he designed the Global Center to echo the height and general shape of buildings such as Public Auditorium, the Cleveland Public Library and the city’s Board of Education building.

He also designed the building to be perceived generally as a large, solid form, like the earlier structures in the Group Plan, but without their classical columns, cornices and capitals.

MMPI Inc. of Chicago, which acted as developer of the project, wanted exhibit halls inside the Global Center to have plenty of daylight. This posed a problem for Vinoly: How could the building look solid and transparent at the same time?

Vinoly’s solution was to create a pattern of glass and precast concrete panels that would vary in dimensions like the different bands in graphic images of DNA sequences.

The amount of opacity or transparency would vary across the expanse of the building’s south, west and north facades to admit plenty of daylight to the interior, while preserving the impression of the building as a large, solid form.

To give the building’s precast panels a sense of three-dimensional relief, Vinoly designed them with sculptural motifs based on the image of a DNA helix. When illuminated by raking sunlight, the precast panels seem to undulate as if they were organic forms, rather than part of a building. When in shadow, they look flat.

Vinoly said he likes both effects.

Vinoly oriented the Global Center’s big atrium toward the Mall, so as to emphasize a strong connection between the green expanse outside and the assembly spaces within.

The effect inside the Global Center is a clear sense of orientation and connection to the city outside.

Views from the upper floors of the atrium in the Global Center for Health Innovation frame a sizable chunk of Cleveland's architectural history.

Views to the east encompass the broad, neoclassical facade of the city’s Public Auditorium, built in 1922. Rising beyond are the office towers of the Erieview Urban Renewal District.

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One could conduct a pretty good tour of Cleveland architecture simply by standing on one of the three bridges suspended along the inside of the atrium’s glass façade, which create shortcuts between the north and south ends of the building’s exhibit areas.

If you look northeast from the atrium, you can see City Hall and glimpse the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Lake Erie. To the southeast, there’s the public library, the Board of Education Building and the Federal Reserve Building.

Given these and other perspectives, it could easily be said that while the Global Center’s big job is to help brand the city as a hub of medical innovation, another service it performs is that of showing off the city itself.

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