CLEVELAND, Ohio – The Cleveland Clinic today announced that it plans to build a Neurological Institute building and to expand its Cole Eye Institute.

Sites for both structures are located within the Clinic’s 165-acre campus west of University Circle and just south of Euclid Avenue in the city’s Fairfax neighborhood.

Architects have not yet been hired, and the Clinic didn’t say how much it plans to spend on the two facilities. The health system said in a news release that it expected philanthropic donations to pay “in large part” for the costs.

Groundbreaking for the Cole expansion is scheduled for 2020, and within two years for the Neurological Institute.

Clinic President and CEO Tomislav Mihaljevic said in his annual State of the Clinic address in February that the organization planned to invest in its neurological institute, which currently occupies one of the oldest buildings on campus, and in Cole Eye.

Those hints took specific form today.

Chris Connell, the Clinic’s chief design officer, said the eye institute would expand by 100,000 to 150,000 square feet on a site immediately south of the existing Cole building at 2022 E. 105th St.

Cole has grown during the past 10 years to reach one of the highest patient volumes in the U.S., the Clinic said in a news release. Patient visits have increased from 130,000 a year in 2008 to more than 310,000 in 2018. Surgical procedures have increased during the same period from 5,000 to more than 16,000 a year.

The addition to Cole will feature and ophthalmic surgical center, increasing the number of operating rooms from five to 12, and adding 60 new exam rooms. It also will house a new Center of Excellence in Ophthalmic Imaging, an expanded simulation center for training, and a larger ophthalmic research center.

A rendering depicts a glassy new addition to the Cleveland Clinic's Cole Eye Institute, right. The building would be located on the south side of a grassy mall separating it from the Taussig Cancer Center, left.Courtesy Cleveland Clinic

The existing Cole building, designed by architect Cesar Pelli and completed in 1999, will be renovated and joined to the new building.

The building will flank the north side of the Clinic’s “green spine,’’ a discontinuous landscaped mall that extends east-west through the center of the campus between Euclid and Carnegie avenues, interrupted by the Crile Pavilion and the tight cluster of core buildings that includes the Miller and Glickman pavilions.

The expanded Cole facility “is designed to provide exceptional clinical, diagnostic and surgical services for the entire range of eye diseases, as well as to facilitate research and discovery of the next generation of new therapies,” Daniel F. Martin, M.D., chair of the eye institute and the Barbara and A. Malachi Mixon III Institute Chair of Ophthalmology, said in a news release.

The new neurological institute will consolidate outpatient neurological care currently delivered in eight locations on the Clinic’s main campus. The 400,000-square-foot building will be located along the south side of Euclid Avenue east of the Miller and Glickman pavilions, and north of the InterContintental Hotel, on the north side of the “green spine.”

The L-shaped structure will wrap around the south and west sides of the East Mt. Zion Baptist Church at 9990 Euclid Ave., Connell said.

Services provided in the building will include digitized patient evaluations, imaging, neuro simulation training, infusion therapy, neurodiagnostics, and brain mapping, along with space for research investigating new therapies.

The center will provide neurology-related distance health care and digitized data processing and management, the Clinic said.

The Neurological Institute provides care to 225,000 patients a year. Patient volumes are projected to increase to 300,000 a year by 2025.

“The new Cleveland Clinic neurological building will become the hub for patient centered-care, distance health, digitization, discovery and innovation,’’ Andre Machado, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Neurological Institute and the Charles and Christine Carroll Family Endowed Chair in Functional Neurosurgery, said in the news release.