This blog post by Steven Litt of The Plain Dealer, notes that Case Western has narrowed the design field for its new landmark facility to four firms. Litt shares his provides insights into the challenges and issues of this new urban building and its placement among landmarks:

The site presents enormous physical and conceptual difficulties. It's irregular in shape. It includes a large underground parking garage, which serves Severance Hall and the Kelvin Smith Library. And it's surrounded by buildings in a variety of clashing styles, with oddly shaped outdoor spaces around them.

"We recognize that the building has to hold its own against some very prominent neighbors," Campbell said. "It's a tough problem to solve."

Severance Hall and the Cleveland Museum of Art are neoclassical, and date from the early 20th century, although the museum's expansion, designed by Raphael Vinoly, takes inspiration from the Brutalist architecture of Marcel Breuer, who designed a prior museum expansion in 1971.

The Kelvin Smith Library, designed by the Washington D.C. firm of Hartman Cox in the early 1990s, is a bland, post-modern neoclassical building. Nearby on Bellflower Road, there's Frank Gehry's explosively sculptural Peter B. Lewis Building, clad in shiny stainless steel.

The schizophrenic environment in part symbolizes CWRU's uneven and uncertain approach to architecture and campus planning in recent decades. The University Center represents an opportunity to pull everything together -- but it won't be an easy task.