The Frank Gehry Skyscraper That Was Never Built in Cleveland

Architect Frank Gehry was known worldwide for projects like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; and a concert hall-turned-prison in Springfield in an episode of “The Simpsons,” which included a cameo by the architect.

Gehry, who died at 96 years old in early December, is probably best known in Cleveland for the Peter B. Lewis Building at Case Western Reserve University. The building, part of the university’s Weatherhead School of Management, bears all Gehry’s hallmarks, most notably stainless steel in his curvilinear style, and is the culmination of a 20-year working relationship between the architect and the building’s namesake, the former Progressive Insurance CEO and patron of the arts.

Their relationship was likened to that of Frank Lloyd Wright and Edgar Kaufmann, the Pittsburgh department store magnate who commissioned Fallingwater, a house and now museum in Southwest Pennsylvania.

Gehry also designed another never-built project that could have changed the landscape of Downtown Cleveland.

On Lewis’ watch, Progressive had ascended from a small insurance company for high-risk drivers to a major underwriter. He sought to build a corporate headquarters in Downtown Cleveland, just north of the Mall, spanning the bluffs and railroad tracks separating the lakefront from Downtown, and turned to Gehry, who was already designing a home for him in Lyndhurst. A 1987 Plain Dealer story detailed plans for a building that would have been the tallest in the city at the time, including a hotel, retail and parking for thousands of cars. It would also display some of Lewis’ modern art, and atop the structure would have been a statue by Claes Oldenburg, who made the Free Stamp, which at the time was sitting in a warehouse, its fate up for debate.

Ultimately, the headquarters was never built. “It was too complicated to get done,” Lewis said in 1991. The home was also never built as prices skyrocketed. Gehry likened his work with Lewis to a MacArthur Genius Grant, giving him funding to allow him to experiment and serving as an incubator for his later ideas, particularly his use of computer graphic design to plan the curvilinear elements that became his hallmark.

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