When it is finished next year, the new $27 million Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Farshid Moussavi, will perch, like a lustrous black gem, at the entrance to the district, at Euclid and Mayfield Road. A pedestrian plaza designed by James Corner Field Operations, a designer of the High Line elevated park in New York City, separates the new museum from two four-story, mixed-use residential buildings under construction on the north and south sides of Euclid.

The 60,106-square-foot south building will have 70 rental apartments above 21,189 square feet of restaurant and retail space. The north structure, larger at 84,399 square feet, has 44 apartments and 36,480 square feet of retail space that includes a bookstore and a big grocery, the first in the area. Both buildings were designed by Stanley Saitowitz of Natoma Architects in San Francisco, and built at a cost of $44 million by MRN Ltd., a Cleveland development group.

To get residents and visitors to and from the arts district, the Regional Transit Authority is planning to move two existing rail stops on the city’s 19-mile Red Line closer to Uptown, nearby Little Italy and Case Western Reserve University at a cost of nearly $30 million.

“All of this new construction is enhanced by international design,” said Ari Maron, a 33-year-old partner in the family-owned MRN Ltd. “The focus is the street. You provide the right mix of assets. You fill the buildings with people and open the storefronts to the sidewalk. You create a place where people want to be which didn’t exist before.”

In effect, the Uptown area will be what amounts to a new downtown for the University Circle neighborhood on the east side of the city. Within the square mile of University Circle, and within easy walking distance of Uptown, are Case Western Reserve, the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Cleveland Institute of Music, University Hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History.