CLEVELAND, Ohio - The Metro Campus of Cuyahoga Community College is about to undergo a much-needed heart transplant, architecturally speaking.

On Tuesday, Sept. 27, Tri-C plans to break ground for a radical, $38 million redo of the three-story Campus Center that will strip the building back to its structural frame and turn it from a brick and concrete bunker into a light, welcoming and transparent campus centerpiece.

In addition, Tri-C is already underway with an estimated $28 million landscaping project scheduled for completion by 2020 that will soften the edges of the Metro campus, plus add greenery and social and outdoor recreational space.

Big deal

The changes are a big deal for one of the toughest and meanest-looking campuses in Northeast Ohio.

They also bode well for Cleveland's poor, majority black Central neighborhood, where well-intentioned utopian visions of midcentury modernist architecture created harsh-looking public housing and other environments that cry out for change.

The nearly 50-acre Tri-C Metro campus at East 30th Street and Community College Avenue was largely built between 1966 and 1970 and was originally designed by the Cleveland architecture firm of Outcault, Guenther, Rode and Bonebrake.

The design is a legacy from the heyday of Brutalist architecture, which became popular in the 1960s after unrest including the 1966 Hough Riots in Cleveland.

The thinking back then was that in order to save the cities, urban planners and architects had to harden them up with built-in barricades and rugged buildings that looked capable of withstanding onslaughts by raging mobs.

The cover of a recent book on Le Corbusier, famous for his heavy-rimmed black glasses and for laying the groundwork for Brutalist architecture.

Architects took inspiration from the designs of the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier, who advocated rough-textured buildings in molded concrete and cities with super-blocks that erased traditional and walkable street grids.

Local examples include the Cuyahoga County Justice Center - now under analysis about whether it should be renovated or replaced - plus large portions of the Cleveland State University campus, and Marcel Breuer's Ameritrust Tower on East Ninth Street south of Euclid Avenue, which has been turned into a hotel and apartments.

The city's Erieview Urban Renewal District abounds in the mixed legacy of Brutalism.

Le Corbusier's own buildings are full of majesty, poetry and mystery; works by his followers and imitators, not so much.

Podium, anyone?

The 30-acre core of Tri-C Metro campus is set atop a large concrete deck, or "podium,'' flanked by areas of grass set about one story below the chunky concrete parapets around the edge. The effect is that of creating a moat between the college and the surrounding community.

Riding atop the platform, which serves as the roof of a giant underground garage, are a dozen clunky buildings designed with dark, deeply recessed windows or blank walls of brick, concrete or shiny black slate.

The place looks more like an industrial plant than a place of learning, joy and discovery.

The Tri-C buildings are interspersed among austere concrete plazas and are linked by concrete-frame covered walkways laid out in a robotic grid of right-angled turns that treat students like machine cogs without free will.

The upshot is that Tri-C Metro, where students prepare for careers in health care, hospitality management, electrical engineering, or recording arts and technology, exudes a punitive air.

Leveraging change

Metro's big upcoming projects embody the recognition that it would be impossible to change the entire campus. They are instead a practical, pragmatic effort to make a few big retrofits to the midcentury modern campus that will produce a big payoff.

The Campus Center, which houses student organization offices, a cafeteria and other central services, will undergo a sweeping makeover designed by the Cleveland-based architecture firm of Bialosky, which is also designing the Van Aken redevelopment in Shaker Heights.

The project will surgically remove everything from the building's underlying concrete skeleton.

Around the remaining framework, the architects will build what amounts to an entirely new building and wrap it in a curving, metal and glass shell. At night, it should light up like a lantern.

The design will eliminate lower-level outdoor pathways that cut around the building on its north, east and south sides by covering them with new plaza areas, thereby removing the impression that the structure is a castle edged by a moat.

Neighborhood connections

This will have an especially big impact on the East 30th Street side of the campus, which will look and feel accessible and completely opened up to the surrounding Central neighborhood.

A Starbucks and a Barnes & Noble, visible from the street, could turn the building into a welcoming local hub instead of an aloof, fortress-like enigma, which is what it is today.

In the renderings, the arrangement of glass and metal panels designed for the new skin of the Campus Center looks slightly busy, as if it is trying too hard to generate visual interest amid bleak surroundings.

Project Details

What:

The Tri-C Metro makeover.

Components:

Radical redo of the Campus Center building plus new landscaping across the 30-acre core campus.

Designers:

Campus Center: Bialosky, Cleveland; landscaping: City Architecture, Cleveland.

Total cost:

$66 million.

Funding for landscaping and garage roof redesign:

Higher Education Funding Commission. $7 million received so far; another $10 million allocated. Tri-C will seek an estimated additional $11 million from the commission.

Funding for Campus Center:

$2.5 million from Higher Education Funding Commission; remainder from Tri-C funds.

But in general, the new architecture proposed for the Campus Center has the potential to transform perceptions of the Metro campus, and perhaps even to make the remaining buildings look halfway decent.

That's also very true of the second big project at Metro, already underway, which will soften the harsh, hard-edged concrete plazas that now surround most buildings on campus by introducing new areas of grass and trees inside the facility and around its edges.

Designed by City Architecture, the project is divided into four phases, the most important of which is scheduled for completion in the fall of 2018, along with the new Campus Center.

This part of the project will replace the elevated platform at the northeast corner of the campus with landscaping that will slope gently down to the intersection of East 30th Street and Community College Avenue.

Softer and more welcoming

The landscaping will provide multiple curved pathways directly from surrounding sidewalks into the campus, in dramatic contrast to the current design, which channels all visitors and students up and down a handful of staircases or across bridges that traverse the virtual moat that surrounds the campus.

"Making the campus more outward-facing and more accessible to the public was one of our biggest goals," Michael Schoop, president of the Metro campus, said in a recent interview.

It looks like he'll get his wish.

A Cuyahoga County Metropolitan Housing Authority rendering of a redevelopment on the north side of Community College Avenue at East 30th Street, opposite a separate revamp of the Tri-C Metro campus that will soon get underway.

Tri-C Metro's projects should also dovetail very nicely with a big project on the north side of Community College Avenue at East 30th Street, where the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority is replacing stalag-style Olde Cedar Estates and Cedar Extension Estates with street-friendly mixed-income apartments and townhouses.

The upshot is that CMHA and Tri-C together are revising the legacy of midcentury modernism by drawing on a half-century's worth of new design wisdom about how to make cities better places to live, work and learn. That's good news for Central, and for the entire city.