In a gesture with a rocky back-story and rich historical nuances, Case Western Reserve University will honor internationally renowned architect Frank Gehry and philanthropist Peter B. Lewis during commencement ceremonies on May 19.

Lewis, the chairman of Mayfield-based Progressive Corp., has been named the 2013 commencement speaker. He’ll also receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters degree. So will Gehry.

The honors will punctuate the end of the 10th anniversary year of the Weatherhead School of Management's Peter B. Lewis Building, the curvaceous and exuberant building designed by Gehry and named for Lewis in honor of a $37 million donation that made the project possible.

CWRU President Barbara Snyder said she’s excited to stage a Lewis-Gehry reunion and to honor both men. The event also continues a rapprochement between Lewis and his hometown after he charged in the early 2000s that CWRU mismanaged its side of the design process for the building and let the cost skyrocket from $40 million to $61.7 million.

In his anger, Lewis staged a temporary one-person boycott of Cleveland charities. He has since resumed local giving, including a recent, $5 million donation to the Cleveland Institute of Art.

“I don’t want to say its ancient history, because people have long memories,” Snyder said of the troubled origins of the Peter B. Lewis Building. But she said, “I do want to say I built a relationship with Peter that stands on its own.”

The Peter B. Lewis Building at Case Western Reserve University houses the Weatherhead School of Management.

Lewis could not be reached immediately for comment Monday. Last fall, he said of Snyder, "she has impressed me from the day she arrived."

In 2008, CWRU honored Lewis with the inaugural President’s Award for Visionary Achievement. Snyder said she wanted to recognize Lewis’s philanthropy overall. In recent years, Lewis has given more than $200 million to his alma mater, Princeton University, and to other causes including the American Civil Liberties Union and efforts for decriminalize marijuana use.

This time around, CWRU wants to honor Lewis for his achievements as the president, CEO and chairman of Progressive, the once tiny company that Lewis built into the third-largest auto insurer in the U.S., with 25,000 employees nationwide.

Snyder said it was easy to get Lewis to agree to accept both honors, despite his prior hard feelings toward CWRU.

“I just invited him to come both times and both times he said yes,” she said, “We are thrilled to be giving him an honorary degree in recognition of the leadership record he established at Progressive.”

In Gehry’s case, Snyder said the university wanted to formally honor one of the world’s most celebrated architects to highlight how “the design of spaces can affect human beings in positive ways.”

The Lewis building was the scene of a shootout in 2003 that left one man dead; it also earned criticism when ice cascaded off its shiny, curvy, stainless steel roof. The university addressed the problem by extending planting beds around the building beneath the affected areas.

Since then, the building has been warmly embraced by CWRU and Weatherhead, which has made “Designing as Managing” a hallmark of its curriculum in response to Gehry’s innovative approach to architecture.

Gehry is known worldwide for being the first architect to fully exploit software normally used to design cars and fighter jets to design wildly sculptural buildings.

At Weatherhead, students and faculty have said in interviews that the building stimulates fresh thinking.”

Last fall, Peter Choi, a freshman from Cupertino, Calif., who planned to major in business, said he came to CWRU in part because “I wanted to go study in this cool-looking building. When you think business, you think uptight, corporate suits. This building is not uptight. This is where the business world is heading.”

Apart from his patronage of the building for Weatherhead, Lewis is credited for having cajoled CWRU under former president Edward Hundert into bringing Gehry back to Cleveland to help jumpstart the thinking that eventually led to the creation of the $150-million-plus Uptown residential, retail and cultural district.

The university donated land to the 8-acre project and helped in other ways to make it possible in collaboration with University Circle Inc., local foundations, the art institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. The collaborative effort echoes Lewis’s failed attempt in the late 1980s to build a skyscraper headquarters tower on the downtown lakefront, also designed by Gehry, that would have included a contemporary art museum.

“We claim great pride in Uptown,” Snyder said. “We owe a lot to Peter and Frank and others who contributed early ideas that sparked that development.”