CWRU wants a new $300 million research building to boost the economy, increase intelligence and break down racial boundaries

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Case Western Reserve University has big ambitions with the new $300 million research building it plans to mark as the largest single investment on its main campus in decades.

New designs for the new interdisciplinary science and technology building, released today through cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, represent a project that will have implications for the CWRU campus, the surrounding University Circle area and the rest of Northeast Ohio might have.

It will be south of Euclid Avenue on the west side of Case Quad, part of the former Case Institute of Technology, which merged with Western Reserve University in 1967. The location overlooks Martin Luther King Jr. Drive to the west.

The new building is designed not only to help the CWRU attract more funding and improve its rankings, but also to help boost the regional economy, attract and retain top researchers, and open up a closed-off part of its campus that has been around for long been an exclusion criterion “message to adjacent predominantly black neighborhoods.

“It’s absolutely critical to our future,” said CWRU President Eric Kaler. “It makes a statement about who we are and, more importantly, who we will be.”

CWRU President Eric Kaler places a model of a proposed $300 million research building in a tabletop model of the university’s Case Quad.

He said the project is “by far” the CWRU’s largest planned investment since moving to Cleveland in 2021, after serving as president of the University of Minnesota from 2011 to 2019. The university is also spending $110 million to build two new dormitories in its southern residential village.

Kaler, a chemical engineer with 10 patents, said he came to the CWRU specifically to kick-start what he calls “stagnant” non-medical research activities.

“We need to expand our research activities outside of medicine; “They’ve been pretty stagnant for the last 15 years or so, and that’s not where we want to be,” he said. “We haven’t built a new laboratory building outside of medicine for decades.”

assess impact

Baiju Shah, president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the region’s chamber of commerce, hailed the project as an important complement to research efforts at institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland State University and NASA’s Glenn Research Center.

“I am very pleased that all of our research facilities are growing at this time,” said Shah.

The new building could allow the CWRU to play a role in Cleveland similar to that of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where robotics research is helping boost the local economy, Shah said.

Kaler and senior administrators at the CWRU said research in the building will focus on interdisciplinary explorations that could inspire collaborations with established and growing industries in Northeast Ohio.

“We’re not big enough to take on all the problems in the world and then solve them all well, so we have to make choices and that’s very difficult,” said Ragu Balakrishnan, dean of the Case School of Mechanical Engineering. He will oversee research projects in the new building along with Joy Ward, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who will serve as interim provost starting July 1.

They said the building aims to break down academic barriers by providing new space for research by faculty across disciplines, who are now housed in buildings across campus. The aim is also to attract academic stars from other institutions by enabling them to participate in furnishing their own research rooms.

Projects could include, for example, the development of industrial-scale batteries for the power grid, research into new environmentally friendly processes for sustainable production, studying pathogens that reproduce in air conditioning systems, developing new types of prosthetics and promoting new connections between the Humanities and the STEM disciplines – science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

When and where

CWRU plans to start construction in late 2024 and complete the new building by 2026. Funding will be split 50 percent between philanthropic donations and a portion of the $350 million in centenary bonds CWRU issued in 2022, Kaler said.

The building will replace Yost Hall, a former dormitory that houses the Department of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics. Built in 1955, Yost covers less than 50,000 square meters – about a quarter of the area that the new building will house.

The new $300 million research building at CWRU will replace Yost Hall, which faces the parking lot across from Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in University Circle.

The planning of the new building was not without glitches. The Observer, the CWRU’s independent student newspaper and website, reported in April that 81 professors, graduate students and students associated with Yost signed an open letter saying the administration was doing a poor job of communicating about the project and it was they were not told where they would be working after Yost came down.

CWRU responded that it had “communicated regularly with those affected by this project at Yost Hall” but also recognized “that relocations are inherently uncomfortable – especially when people have been in one place for many years.” “The engagement continues and every effort will be made to minimize disruption to all involved.”

A bridge between city and dress

A key goal of the new building is to open up a campus that felt closed off from MLK Drive, a physical reality with racist connotations. Over the past century, CWRU and Case Institute have designed the buildings that face MLK Drive with blank walls, back doors, trash cans, loading docks, and large parking lots.

Eight buildings along the west side of the Case Quad at CWRU face MLK Drive with parking lots, dumpsters, loading docks and tarmac.

In part, the university’s approach was a response to periodic flooding along the Doan Brook drainage, which is now channeled through. But the university and its neighbors have also recognized that the CWRU has turned its back on the surrounding neighborhoods.

Architect Peter Cook, design director and vice president in HGA’s Washington office, said he was designing the building to have “an inviting face” from MLK. “We want it to be very bright, light, airy and welcoming.”

Preliminary renderings show that rather than a single large mass, the new building will resemble a collection of rectangular blocks that slide back and forth, with varying roof levels and window grilles that create a sense of dynamism and movement.

On the MLK Drive side, the building will sit close to the boulevard and fill an area now occupied by a parking lot. Kaler said he wants the glass lobby on the MLK side to glow blue at night — the color of CWRU.

Today, a row of eight CWRU buildings across from MLK Drive resembles a virtually impenetrable barrier. The exception is a steep stairway on the south side of Yost that climbs a weed-covered slope from the parking lot on the MLK side to get to the Case Quad.

A stairway provides pedestrians with the rare outdoor access from the parking lots at CWRU to the Case Quad on campus.

Plans for the new building include the creation of a wide, inviting, wheelchair-accessible walkway on the north side between it and Tomlinson Hall to provide an exterior connection from the MLK facade to the Case Quad

Kaler said one of the key features of the new building will be a glass-enclosed, ground-level cafe or coffee shop. The café will embody the CWRU’s goal of promoting what Balakrishnan called “chance collisions” between researchers and students to spark new discoveries.

Rise in the ranking

With annual research spending of $421 million in 2021, the most recent year for which comparative data is available, CWRU was ranked 66th on a list of American universities compiled by the National Science Foundation’s HERD Survey, short for Higher Education Research and Development. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was #1 with research spending of nearly $3.2 billion.

CWRU says on its website that it aims to increase annual research spending to $600 million within 10 years, but Michael Oakes, CWRU’s new senior vice president of research, hired by Kaler of the University of Minnesota, said, he wants to reach the goal sooner.

Spending $600 million annually on research spending would see the CWRU rival the University of Virginia, Charlottesville for 48th place in the HERD survey, according to 2021 figures.

“We have to do this,” Oakes said of the project. “This is not a luxury item for Case Western. We need it to grow and be competitive and I think it’s necessary for the region too. We don’t have enough research space and what we have is falling apart.”

He added that the CWRU is motivated by their desire to serve Cleveland – a city that fights poverty, segregation and depopulation by building on assets like the university.

“There isn’t a great city in the world without a great research university,” Oakes said.