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A success story for the City of Cleveland, and a 21st century model for urban reinvestment through public/private partnerships, the 1912 historic structure is transformed as a collaborative, technology-based hub that is revitalized through new uses and multi-tenant spaces. The collaborative design vision for Idea Center leverages its highly visible, street front location on Euclid Avenue, the main corridor of Cleveland’s commercial, retail, and entertainment district, to inject a new, dynamic vitality to the city’s urban core. Idea Center encompasses the 90,000-square-foot Idea Center tenant suite—an innovative, collaborative facility for ideastream and Playhouse Square Foundation’s arts education programs, integrating digital multiple media and public broadcast communication with performing arts and arts education. The Idea Center tenant suite exemplifies how design can serve as the transparent and flexible armature for connectivity, creativity and communication, and the synergies of collocation. Idea Center Tenant Suite adaptive re-use
players:
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Through its ongoing relationship with Playhouse Square Foundation as master planners for over 25 years, Westlake Reed Leskosky was asked to perform initial feasibility analysis of the 1375 Euclid Avenue building—extensive planning and multiple physical programming spanning five years of study. |
 Dance and rehearsal studio, visible from Euclid Avenue and lobby |
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 Reception and lobby area of the Arts & Educationcomponent |
This feasibility analysis
demonstrated to the partnership the economies of collocation, including
sharing commonly programmed and designed spaces and other building
services, which reduced the project size from 120,000 square
feet to 90,000 square feet and translated to significant construction
cost savings. The Idea Center project has resulted in a combined
savings in excess of $7 million to the partners as
well as the community.
The project was structured to take advantage of federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits, providing significant equity to the project. Westlake Reed Leskosky provided historic tax credit consulting services to the owner partnership for the entire structure, including recommendations for appropriate window replacement and storefront modifications to meet requirements, as well as creating documentation for façade easements and lost development rights. This initiative involved consultation with the Cleveland Restoration Society and Cleveland Landmarks Commission, and significant collaboration with the State Historic Preservation Office, and the National Park Service under the U.S. Department of the Interior.
“Our move to Idea Center takes advantage of the synergies that we can form with the community as well as Playhouse Square. We are in the business of knowledge and education,” says Kathryn P. Jensen, Chief Operating Officer of ideastream. “The new facilities, technology, and collaborations will have a tremendous impact and allow us to expand our reach into the community.”
The architectural concept for the Idea Center tenant suite inserts a contemporary and highly flexible design into the context of the existing building. Openness and transparency break down traditional barriers among media and foster new connections, creativity, and collaborations. The design of the tenant suite creates a fluid container as an interactive and accessible armature for multiple media that engages the public and community. The visual openness and large storefront windows of the Idea Center building, renovated as frames on the Euclid Avenue façade, take advantage of the activity of nearby Playhouse Square and its location on the city’s major commercial and retail corridor to add vitality to the neighborhood at large.
The suite exposes its programmatic components, and allows the multilevel activities and movement of its space to be readily visible at street level to experience the excitement of live, “backstage” studio environment. One of the primary broadcast studios of ideastream is positioned in the west storefront, while a dance studio for Playhouse Square is located in the east storefront. Thus, the architectural programming of the suite makes use of traditional retail spaces to present the “mission” and “function” of these institutions—and activating the urban realm.
Activities on the three floors are connected physically and visually by deep wells and stairways from large openings cut into the building, encouraging interaction. A light court is notched in the inner areas of the deep, 450-foot long building. The massive columns and concrete floors of the original structure and technological infrastructure are exposed, juxtaposing old and new elements. Materials such as steel and glass express the loft-like and industrial character of backstage space. Interior glass partitions allow visual access to activity as well as daylight to pass through the long building. Scaffolding, overhead trays of multicolored cables, electronics, monitors, sound and light systems are revealed to further reinforce the dynamic and technologically advanced nature of the programs.
“The Idea Center suite serves current and emerging technologies, but also future technologies that we cannot even anticipate. Our design breaks down the barriers between media to become as open and flexible as possible. The facility is conceived as a fluid container, highly interactive, and visually open—an armature for media that engages the public and community,” describes architect Ronald A. Reed, FAIA, IIDA, principal and a lead designer at Westlake Reed Leskosky.
The plan locates spaces for presentation on the Euclid Avenue frontage, and work areas for creation at the other end of the 450-foot-deep, block-long building. These areas are connected by circulation and gathering areas and technology integrated throughout the facility. Representing the coming together of public broadcast and performing arts, two active studios are located in the glass storefront areas visible to the Euclid Avenue streetscape: the multiple media based Kelvin & Eleanor Smith Foundation & The Kent H. Smith Charitable Trust Studio, and the fully appointed George Gund Foundation Dance Studio for rehearsals and classes. A glass partition in the Smith Studio functions as an oversized, mechanically operated double hung window, allowing the space to be closed for production or opened to the public.
These two studios flank the main entrance from Euclid Avenue. A by-pass corridor separates public and internal circulation to manage traffic and flow through the building, ranging from celebrities to large groups of school children. Like a town square, the Jane & Jon Outcalt Lobby serves as the “command center” for Idea Center—an open gathering area for reception, stage direction functions, and concierge customer and Internet services. Transparent internal glass walls allow the activity of the studios to be viewed as visitors traverse the Outcalt Lobby. Large open lobbies on upper and lower floors promote visitor orientation and navigation through the facility. These lobbies are connected by an internal monumental stair, composed of stainless steel and woven wire ‘cloth’ railing systems. A viewing space is created as a mezzanine level (The Stouffer Mezzanine Landing, gift of Lois and Tom Stauffer) on the internal stairwell, providing a vertical connection and visibility to spaces below.
As a key feature of Idea Center, the 300-seat Westfield Insurance Studio Theatre is designed and engineered by Westlake Reed Leskosky as a highly flexible “black box” space with state-of-the-art performance and television broadcast capabilities.
Designed as new construction suspended over an existing loading dock and service alley, this unique studio is one of the largest production studios in northeast Ohio. The Westfield Insurance Studio Theatre features collapsible and portable seating systems, specialized floor construction suitable for television production and presentation theater, and dual lighting systems for both theatre and television production instruments. Balcony-like seating above the main black box serves as “skyboxes” for viewing. Accessible by any of three lobby areas, the Westfield Insurance Studio Theatre and all of its support can be isolated.
As the most technically integrated space in the facility, the Westfield Insurance Studio Theatre provides the state-of-the art facilities and equipment for collaborative productions involving theatre and television, and extends the depth of programming presented by ideastream and Playhouse Square Foundation.
Technology is celebrated and threaded throughout the Idea Center tenant suite, providing interconnectivity between five multiple media broadcast studios, five control rooms, multiple edit suites as well as lobby and staff areas on each floor. Two strategic and centralized pathways within the tenant suite, Digital Highways, provide for a consolidated and directed route for the miles of cabling that serve these technical spaces. The pathways coincide with the major circulation paths within the tenant suite, and are designed to expose both the technical infrastructure as well as the activity within the studios, reinforcing the design theme of visibility, transparency and vitality. Digital Highways areprimary corridors exposing technology and connecting spaces.
The first floor Nancy & Rik Kohn Digital Highway is a broad, faceted extension of the Euclid Avenue level lobby, exposing the Smith Studio and KeyBank Studio, associated control rooms, and the intense overhead cable tray infrastructure. On the lower level, the Digital Highway is the primary north-south corridor, exposing Studio 4 and Studio 5, associated control rooms, and the Technical Center. The TechnicalCenter is the consolidated technology “brains” of the facility, integrating the electronic and communications systems and allowing the multiple users to share common infrastructure, resulting in greater facility efficiencies.
Each space, including all studios, work areas, lobbies and classrooms is equipped with broadcast equipment and connections to facilitate ‘capturing’ all of the activity within the building, either to be streamed to web sites, projected onto lobby walls, or taped for use in productions for television or radio. This constant display of live building activity is also carried to the street with large scale projection systems in the Euclid Avenue storefronts. Future plans include integration of broadcast infrastructure into the historic theatres in the Playhouse Square complex to further expand the collaborative opportunities shared by these organizations.
The tenant suite is a model for integrated engineering and a prototype that addresses unprecedented, multiple uses of performing arts, television broadcast, radio broadcast and educational broadcast, each with highly complex and sensitive equipment and technology needs, including reliable, redundant and uninterrupted power for emergency broadcast.
“Multiple, high tech tenants in a building will often want to maintain separate systems, and the result is redundancy and waste in terms of power distribution and heating and cooling infrastructure and basic systems and components,” says Matthew Murphy, PE, associate and mechanical engineer at Westlake Reed Leskosky. “One of the unique things about Idea Center is that there is a central plant and its systems and infrastructure are shared. In addition to the architectural synergies, these engineering synergies lead to lower operating costs and higher efficiency,” he explains.
New power distribution, communications, lighting, theatre lighting and audio, mechanical, communications, broadcast and structural systems for the tenant suite were inserted into the existing, deep building with unique space constraints, as well as integrated into a highly flexible and open architectural design concept. The engineering systems meet high performance demands of the sophisticated communication and technology uses, while also complying with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification requirements, and stringent value engineering evaluations for optimal payback.
Idea Center also represents environmentally responsible redevelopment. Westlake Reed Leskosky provided sustainable design services for the environmentally responsible redevelopment of Idea Center and was instrumental in achieving LEED-CI (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design—Commercial Interiors) Silver certification—one of the first projects in Ohio to receive this designation. The firm worked with ideastream and Playhouse Square Foundation to assess outcomes for building performance, efficiency, and sustainability and their impact on LEED certification. The project is participating in the U.S. Green Building Council LEED-CI (Commercial Interiors) pilot program introducing green building practices to the commercial leased space real estate market.
 Interior office space |
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 Executive area on the second floor |
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The recycling of an existing structure for new, adapted use opened up new challenges and opportunities for innovation and the creation of a high performance and sustainable structure. These included savings on materials and labor, leveraging tax credits and the reduction of space requirements, building costs and future operating costs through shared facilities. |
Sustainable systems include efficient delivery of clean power, occupancy sensors to lower operational costs, a central grounding system, a monitoring and control system to regulate energy according to actual need, and a large scale backup power generator and fuel storage tank to address requirements for high operational reliability. Design and restoration issues encompassed maximizing occupied space, window replacement, reuse of existing building components, paint selection and the use of new materials with recycled content.
The opening of the Idea Center tenant suite in the fall of 2005 set a new benchmark for the integration of education, communication, arts and technology, and has resulted in demonstrated success. Its role as a vehicle for education, communication and community outreach is paramount, with Playhouse Square’s arts education estimated to more than double its current audience and increase to reaching 200,000 children, families and subscribers annually by 2007, and ideastream to expand teacher training programs and its leading-edge distance learning programs in addition to augmenting programs with the new digital technology capabilities at the Idea Center suite. Beyond this success, this transformational project, created in a fluid design process, also provides the flexible and collaborative framework for potential future ideas and uses as unlimited as the imagination.
For more information on the Idea Center, please go to: ideacenter.wviz.org/
Owner Partner:
WVIZ/PBS and 90.3 WCPN ideastreamsm and the Playhouse
Square Foundation
Master Planner, Playhouse Square District, and Feasibility
Analyst and Programmer, IdeaCenter:
Westlake Reed Leskosky
Design Lead Architects and Engineers, IdeaCenterBuilding Restoration:
URS
Design Lead Architects and Engineers, IdeaCenter Tenant
Suite Adaptive Reuse for WVIZ/PBS and 90.3 WCPN ideastream Headquarters
and Playhouse Square Foundation Arts Education
Programs; and
Sustainable Design Services and Historic Tax Credit Consultant, IdeaCenter:
Westlake Reed Leskosky
Construction Manager, IdeaCenterBuilding Restoration
and IdeaCenter Tenant Suite Adaptive Reuse:
Turner Construction
Broadcast Systems Designer and Equipment Integrator, Theatrical
Sound and Video Reinforcement Designer, and Audio/Video Theme
Systems Designer, IdeaCenter Tenant Suite:
The
Systems Group
How the Idea Center got to LEED-CI The Idea Center Tenant Suite at Playhouse Square has received LEED-CI (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design—Commercial Interiors) Silver certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. Kathryn Jensen of WCPN ideastream, the broadcast partner, emphasizes the higher value of environmental stewardship. “Sustainability at Idea Center goes beyond the credits for points. We achieve something better for the neighborhood—a “cool” building, less ozone depletion, for example. During this process of making the space work for multiple partners and making a high performance building, we thought about it in micro issues, but yet the impact of each decision on the larger community is enormous,” Jensen concludes. “Essentially we have saved and recycled a building. We had already invested in a centralized chilled water plant using district steam for heat. There was a number of high impact initiatives that were suggested throughout the process to do things a little differently and that really worked,” says Tom Einhouse of Playhouse Square Foundation. “We now know things that we will always do as we go forward, regardless of whether we get a LEED point, but because we know they are the right things to do.” Monica Green, AIA, CSI, CCS, associate principal of Westlake Reed Leskosky, and the first individual in Ohio to be designated as a LEED accredited professional by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), recognizes the importance of leadership decisions in sustainable design, “The decision making process contributed to the success of Idea Center with LEED for commercial interiors. One crucial decision was to create a partnership to share space among community organizations, resulting in lower space requirements, leading to reduced building costs and operating costs. The other crucial decision was to reuse an existing downtown building, saving on materials and contributing to the continued economic revival of an historic district.” Sustainable systems include efficient delivery of clean power, occupancy sensors to lower operational costs, a central grounding system yielding additional benefits, a monitoring and control system to regulate energy according to actual need, and a large scale backup power generator and fuel storage tank to address requirements for high operational reliability. Design and restoration issues encompassed maximizing occupied space, window replacement, reuse of existing building components, paint selection and the use of new materials with recycled content. The achievement of high performance in energy and environmental design at Idea Center and the Idea Center tenant suite results from a number of strategies in a number of categories: Sustainable Sites: By reusing an existing building, materials were saved by minimizing new construction, and serving as a catalyst for other redevelopment and business relocation in the neighborhood. Taking advantage of a bus stop not more than 20 feet away from entrance of building, Idea Center resides in the area of the Euclid Corridor Project, which, when completed, will reduce automobile traffic, thus reducing consumption of fossil fuels and pollution (CO2). Idea Center provides storage for bikes, and also includes lockers, showers and changing rooms, reducing the need for an individual vehicle, and further reducing consumption of fossil fuels and pollution. Water Use Reduction: Energy & Atmosphere: The use of T5 HO lamps reduced the amount of light fixtures necessary, contributing to lower lighting power loads and exceeding the ASHRAE/IESNA 90.1 standards. Automatic occupancy lighting controls have been installed so lighting is only on when necessary. Demand Control Ventilation (DCV), increased wall insulation, and window replacement reduces energy associated with heating and cooling. DCV varies the amount of outside air when the population in the building varies. When rooms are partially occupied, less outdoor air is introduced than when the building is fully occupied. Tenants have access to read their energy meters, encouraging energy usage consciousness. Tenants are responsible for the utilities, stimulating a decrease in unnecessary energy waste. Installation of high efficiency, harmonic mitigating transformers harvests significant energy savings and environmental protection benefits that have far reaching benefits lasting the life of the facility. Materials & Resources: Materials were made with post consumer/post industrial recycled material, including access flooring, wood doors, steel doors and frames, metal lockers, carpet, metal studs, audience seating, exterior metal panels, steel and other miscellaneous metals, concrete (fly ash), sound control doors, overhead coiling doors, acoustic ceilings, and aluminum and steel EMI protection. Materials were made with regional materials (manufactured regionally within a 500 mile radius) including woodwork, acoustic doors, coiling doors, glass, operable partitions, acoustic panels, exterior metal panels, metal lockers, elevator equipment, carpet tile, metal studs, steel and miscellaneous metals, and composite floor tile. Indoor Environmental Quality Idea Center is a non-smoking facility. Carbon dioxide monitoring sensors detect ventilation performance and requirements based on occupancy. Intensified housekeeping during construction prevented indoor air quality problems and maintains well being of construction workers and building occupants. The building was flushed out (air handling equipment operated with new filters and outside air) prior to occupancy to remove any particles left in the air or on surfaces by the construction process. Low-emitting materials and products used include sealants, adhesives, carpet, composite wood, systems furniture and most paints. Green housekeeping practices and products meeting Green Seal standards will ensure that good indoor environmental quality is maintained once the building is occupied and operating. |
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Eileen McMorrow, Editor & Publisher — McMorrow Report,
LLC |
