CLEVELAND AIA COMPETITION
Modern architecture is an endangered species in Cleveland. Modernism cannot survive against the will of ill-informed arbiters. Modern architecture must adapt and acquire survival instincts. Modern structures must learn historic preservation law + camouflage + re-programming in order to sustain.
Proposal: Concrete window surrounds from Marcel Breuer’s doomed Cleveland Trust Building will migrate to the Huron Road Building. The concrete surrounds will attach themselves to the “historic” structure, like Canadian Soldiers, and therefore, cannot be harmed. The surrounds will re-orient individually + re-compose collectively to create a new structure that, although aesthetically altered, still possesses the original Breuer DNA. The surrounds will then acquire pigmentation-ornamentation-surface articulation that will allow for the concealment of its original Brutalist identity. Through these tactics, the Modernism may survive to fight another day. The re-constituted surrounds will effectively become a sunscreen for the Huron Road Building and a megastructural symbolic awning for a more potent + vociferous AIA Cleveland.
Although declared the winning entry by a jury of Cleveland’s cultural + arts leadership, this entry was disqualified because of the status of an AIA membership.
