Architect Rafael Viñoly's re-imagining of University Circle's anchor is nearly complete. An enormous glass atrium, 39,000 square feet across, connects the 1971 entrance to the classical 1916 building and the roomy new East Wing. Next year, the West and North wings open and the museum's famed Asian art collection returns.
MOCA started in a University Circle storefront in 1968. Its new home, opened this fall, has brought a signature architectural statement to Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road in the form of a gleaming black cube that offers an artistic welcome mat to the emerging Uptown neighborhood development.
The once-modest institution's expansion includes a huge glass house enclosing simulations of a Costa Rican rainforest and the spiny desert of Madagascar, complete with trees, plants, reptiles, birds and butterflies. Offering two very different experiences under one roof, it's one of Cleveland's best winter refuges.
Designed by Frank Gehry, the home of Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management pushed University Circle's look and feel ahead by decades. The wild waves of its steel roof and its interior's aversion to right angles aim to inspire boundary-breaking creativity in business students and the neighborhood.
Astronomers have narrated planetarium shows here since 1936, but the Shafran Planetarium brought the tradition into the 21st century. Its projector can show 5,000 stars on its 40-foot-diameter dome. The exterior roof, tilted 41½ degrees to imitate Cleveland's latitude, points toward Polaris, the North Star.
