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A rooftop bar and other ideas are on the wish list for the new Cleveland convention center hotel

Clevelanders want the city’snew convention center hotel to have an iconic design, a big impact on the skyline, a rooftop bar that’s open year round, and restaurants and retail shops close to sidewalks on the ground floor.
Those were some of the ideas about the design of a new $260 million convention center hotel that emerged in a free public forum today at the Cleveland Public Library.

Roughly 85 community members, including architects, developers, young professionals and civic leaders spent two hours batting ideas around with representatives of the Atlanta architecture firm of Cooper Carry.

The architects showed no early sketches and didn’t discuss their previous designs. They came to listen – and the Clevelanders who showed up were more than happy to sound off on what they wanted to see in a new hotel downtown.

“I thought it was fantastic,” said Pope Bullock of Cooper Carry, adding he was “greatly pleased and surprised” that so many people showed up on short notice.

“We don’t usually get a turnout like this, and so quickly,” he said.

The 650-room hotel will rise on the current site of the Cuyahoga County Administration Building, which could be demolished starting in December.

Work on the foundations of the new hotel could begin in the spring, said Cleveland lawyer Jeffrey Appelbaum, who is managing the project for the county.

Cooper Carry doesn’t officially have the design job yet; the firm’s appointment has yet to be approved by the Cuyahoga County Council.

Appelbaum said he expected the firm, selected as the best of 17 candidates from around the country, would be approved soon, and that he wanted them to get them working now.

Appelbaum wants first phase “schematic” designs for the hotel ready for public review early in the fall, and the second phase “design development” drawings finished by the end of the year.

The schedule will include enough time to change any designs for the hotel in response to public comments before final approval, he said.

The hotel is intended to drive bookings at the new $465 million taxpayer-financedconvention center and Global Center for Health Innovation in the downtown Group Plan District, a cluster of historic civic and government buildings planned in 1903 by Daniel Burnham of Chicago.

The county, which is acting as the developer of the hotel project, is in the process of hiring a design-build contractor for the project and an operator – a hotel chain – Appelbaum said.

All members of the team will work in concert to assure that any designs shared with the public are buildable and affordable, he said.

The city’s Group Plan Commission, a non-profit organization of civic and business leaders, has temporarily halted design work on enhancements to the 15-acre downtown Mall, part of which doubles as the green roof of the new convention center.

Ann Zoller director of LAND Studio, the non-profit firm coordinating the Mall improvements for the Group Plan Commission, said the organization would continue working on refinements for the big public space once the hotel is designed.

Joe Marinucci, president and CEO of the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, said he wanted the hotel to include residential apartments to boost the downtown population, although he recognized such a mix of uses would be unlikely.

Architect Steven Kordalski said he expected the new hotel to be a compelling piece of architecture “as opposed to the Medical Mart, [Global Center for Health Innovation] which is non-compelling.”

“Don’t copy anything,” Kordalski said. “I’d like to see a modern building.”

Berj Shakarian, the former Cuyahoga County architect, said on the other hand that he wanted to see a building with stone facades that echo older buildings in the Group Plan District, such as the 1916 City Hall, and the 1911 County Courthouse.

Anthony Coyne, chairman of the city’s planning commission and of the Group Plan Commission, said he’d like to see a hotel with open-air balconies.

Martin Cader, Cleveland’s pedestrian and bike coordinator, said he’d like to see space allotted for a bike-sharing station at the hotel.

And Greg Alberti, a local ceramic craftsman who specializes in tile, urged Cooper Carry’s designers to use products created by local artists and craftsmen to give the building’s fine-grained details a local feel.

George Lovejoy of Cleveland said the hotel “should have color and glass, something that reflects light like MOCA [the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland].

“You need to have something you can sell not just to people in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, but to people around the country.”

 

 





 

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