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Cleveland Museum of Industry
Cleveland Museum of Industry
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Cleveland Museum of Industry
Third Year Design Studio, Kent State CAED
As an introduction to larger scale programming & the concerns of site & context, the third year studio, lead by urban design scholar Charles Graves, was charged with the redevelopment of a site in Cleveland, OH. As an exercise in programming, students were permitted to determine the use & location of a building within the city. It was asked only that an unused or derelict site be chosen & the proposed projects respond directly to the physical attributes of that site. Cleveland, as with all “rust belt” cities of the Northeast, has been in a state of transition over the last quarter century. As the national & local economies have switched from being rooted in industry, to devoted to the provision of services, the social landscape & built environment of the city has changed drastically, as well. New institutions have grown as old ones perish, the remnants of which are often left to decay.
The site chosen for this project is emblematic of this reality. The area of Cleveland known as the “Flats” is so called because of its low-lying adjacency to the mouth of the Cuyahoga River on Lake Erie. This geography provided an ideal location for mills, factories, & ports during the industrial boom years of the city. Today, the area consists of empty parking lots & seedy bars, as well as relics & skeletons of the former industrial era. As Cleveland moves further from its industrial past, its inherited identity & former prosperity correspondingly fades in the memory of the community. The proposed program of this project would be an attempt to reconcile the city with its past with a highly visible landmark on a symbolic site. It was decided that a “Museum of Industry” would provide a space where the industrial heritage of the city could be communicated, chronicled, studied, & interpreted. This new cultural institution would be located on a waterside site in the flats (see 2.2).
As study of the site began, vast amounts of discarded industrial structures & equipment were observed. While, initially, it was thought that these objects would merely make up the museum’s collection, it was realized that the new building could be constructed of these abandoned materials. It was thought that this would be a profound, albeit literal, expression of the museum’s intention of preserving & displaying industrial history. In order to select & plan the composition of these found objects, collage was adopted as a design development method. Portions of structures, equipment, & materiel were photographed & pieced together (see 2.1). A basic program of entry, service, permanent & temporary galleries, & a “black box” theater was derived to guide the collage massing exercise. Once certain “pieces” were selected & paired with programmatic elements (a smoke stack/elevator for example), the massing of space was refined through physical models (see 2.3-5), as well through section & plan drawings (see 2.6-9).
Certain qualities of industrial spaces were adopted in the design of the museum. These included the tendency of mills & factories to sprawl horizontally along the water & float on exposed portions of structure. Elements were designed to reflect function in both form & materiality. Also, in order to emulate a factory’s textural complexity of pipes, gauges, & machinery, a portion of the exterior envelope was devoted to a spontaneous, found object collage consisting of objects (rollers, engines, dies, & other apertures) found on the site (see 2.8). This hulking, three-dimensional composition is paired with modern materials & detailing such as anodized aluminum panels which slide open for fork-lift access to the large objects in the collection (see 2.5). In all, this structure strives to honor the past of its site while at once providing a new & vibrant cultural resource.
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