The Design Oasis of Cincinnati

by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

Summary: Cincinnati’s recent willingness to invest in international progressive architecture is more of a continued tradition than a break from the past when considered in the context of the city’s 20th-century design history. Like other similar cites, Cincinnati has become an ideal incubator for high-profile architects.

For an unassuming, midsize Midwestern city, Cincinnati’s stock of contemporary, progressive architecture is unmatched. Zaha Hadid, Hon. FAIA, built her first American project there, the Contemporary Arts Center. Daniel Libeskind, AIA, chose adjacent Covington, Ky., for the privately funded Ascent condo for his second completed American project. The University of Cincinnati has been assembling an unprecedented constellation of contemporary Deconstructivist starchitecture for years.

In 1989, University of Cincinnati administrators realized that they had a disparate and bland college campus, decentralized and awash in parking garages, lacking any cohesive identity. Steve Kenat, AIA, of the Cincinnati firm GBBN, worked on Libeskind’s Ascent and is a University of Cincinnati alum. “[I] signed on for an architectural studies program despite the campus,” he says.

The campus had grown haphazardly, and needed a way to rebrand itself as a vibrant hub of learning, so the school hired landscape architect George Hargreaves to design a master plan that would build the university’s new identity out of the work of architecture’s professional vanguard. Today, students live in dormitories designed by Thom Mayne, FAIA, study in science classrooms by Frank Gehry, FAIA, and eat in cafeterias created by Charles Gwathmey, FAIA. Aspiring architects hone their skills in a complex by Peter Eisenman, FAIA. The campus has nine such “signature architect” buildings.

A new opportunity or an established tradition
The university seems to have set the tone for the city’s acceptance of contemporary architecture. Ron Kull, FAIA, was university architect for 16 years at the University of Cincinnati. He now works at GBBN as a senior planner. He still sees Cincinnati’s relationship with progressive architecture as a work in progress. “We had hoped that it would permeate the city more than it has,” he says. Despite the preponderance of cutting-edge architecture, talk of the “Bilbao Effect” seems as yet inappropriate in Cincinnati, and few in the architecture community see this as valid comparison.

Cincinnati’s architectural landscape is still largely defined by Cass Gilbert’s elegantly columned Neo-Classical PNC Tower and the famously Art Deco Union Terminal train station by Paul Cret, with Alfred Fellheimer and Stewart Wagner. Outside of the university, victories have been sparing but bold: Hadid’s museum, Libeskind’s condo tower, and the news that Dutch firm Neutelings Riedjik’s first project in the U.S. will be an expansion to the Cincinnati Art Museum.

For Cincinnati to have icons from the past that are still so warmly regarded (like Gilbert’s building and Union Terminal) the city must have had a tradition of making what were bold, contemporary choices. Kenat cites a group of four buildings by Daniel Burnham in Cincinnati, built from 1901 to 1903, and Frederick Law Olmstead’s plan for Spring Grove Cemetery in town. “We’ve always gone outside our immediate geography to find something special,” he says.

Early in the 20th century, this meant hiring Cass Gilbert to design a skyscraper that referenced classical antiquity and deferred to European models of urbanism. Sue Ann Painter, the executive director of the Cincinnati Architectural Foundation, says that historically, Midwestern civic leaders looked to places like Paris, Munich, London, and New York for inspiration on how to build their cities. In this context, hiring a Polish-born, New York City-raised architect in Libeskind, or an Iraqi-born, UK-based designer in Hadid is a continuation of the past rather than a break from it.

Kull says Cincinnati and other Midwestern cities where star international architects have made their initial splash are benefiting from the provincial run-up these architects want to make before their work lands in a coastal design capital like New York. Along with Libeskind’s first domestic foray in Denver, and Hadid’s Cincinnati debut, the first completed American project for Frenchman and Pritzker Prize-winner Jean Nouvel, Hon. FAIA, was in Minneapolis. Vienna-based Coop Himmelblau did their first American project at the Akron Museum of Art, and SANAA, a Japanese firm of rising eminence, brought an addition to the Toledo Museum of Art for their stateside debut. Today, all these architects (except Hadid) have a project in New York.

“You might say it’s kind of like Broadway,” Kull says. “You develop a fantastic play—where do you try it out?—in Boston, or in Kansas City, or somewhere you can get your feet under you and then you move into New York.”

What does “local” mean today?
But who’ll come to the local company’s shows? Are the architects of Minneapolis, Akron, and Cincinnati to be forever denied the best commissions in their home towns, quietly toiling away at elementary schools and office blocks? In Cincinnati, local architects have been grinning, bearing it, and signing up as architects of record, often when praise is heaped on the out-of-towners. Dale Beeler, AIA, whose firm KZF was the architect of record for Hadid’s museum, says this has been the cause of “tremendous hurt feelings … It’s a little emasculating to have all the really nice commissions for public works, which are funded by taxpayer money, go to an out-of-town, or out-of-state, or out-of-country architect. It doesn’t seem quite fair, but that seems to be the way our business is going.”

Kenat and Kull say that this local/non-local distinction is becoming less and less relevant in the rapidly converging global marketplace. (Their firm recently opened an office in Bejing.) And several architects said that working with these out-of-town firms exposed them to opportunities they couldn’t have gotten in their native city.

And, besides, Cincinnatians know that a Cincinnati building by a Cincinnati firm is seldom big news. “Sometimes you get locals here, like everywhere else, who are more willing to accept something new when it comes from a briefcase from farther away,” Painter says.