CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Case Western Reserve University has long been something of a Tin Man among American universities — a place in search of a heart.

Born out of the union of Western Reserve University and the Case Institute of Technology in 1967, CWRU has grown over the decades without a strong campus center to unify its two halves.

That’s about to change. The university plans to break ground next spring on the $50 million Tinkham Veale University Center, a centrally located building intended to give CWRU a 24/7 student hangout, a home for student organizations, a jumping-off point for campus tours and a big community gathering space.

The design for the 82,000-square-foot building, released to The Plain Dealer by the university, has a decidedly 21st-century look, with thrusting, wedge-like shapes and sloping green roofs rising two stories out of the ground.

Given its location northeast of Severance Hall between Bellflower Road, Euclid Avenue and East Boulevard, the center will be a highly visible new landmark in University Circle, Cleveland’s cultural, educational and medical hub.

It will also be unlike anything else on campus, except Frank Gehry's shiny, stainless-steel Peter B. Lewis Building for the Weatherhead School of Management, finished nearby in 2002 at the corner of Bellflower Road and Ford Drive.

“This will give us an identity,” Stephen Campbell, the university’s vice president for campus planning and facilities management, said of the new center. “It’s really the first facility that represents the university as a whole and resolves the federation of the two universities that started in the 1970s.”

The university has raised all of the $50 million it needs for basic construction but is raising still more money for interiors and landscaping, said Chris Sheridan, special assistant to CWRU President Barbara Snyder.

The project, to be finished by the fall of 2014, will be named for Case Institute alumnus Tinkham Veale II, who established the Veale Foundation, which donated $20 million for the project.

Designed by Ralph Johnson of Perkins + Will, a respected global architecture firm based in Atlanta and Chicago, the building will be the largest and most visible campus building launched under Snyder, who joined the university in 2007.

It’s also part of a national trend in which colleges and universities are competing among one another to attract students and faculty by building handsome buildings and amenities. Campbell said the center would replace functions now performed — without complete success — by the nearby Thwing Center.

Echoing another important contemporary trend, the building will be environmentally friendly, with a green roof to absorb rainwater and windows designed to prevent excessive heat from sunlight.

Johnson’s design will require a sharp change in perceptions about the CWRU campus. It will literally rise along the route of a key campus path, which joins the two halves of the university. It will feel as if a well-traveled street had suddenly turned into a building. An open space will become a solid form.

At the same time, the pathway will continue to exist; It will simply run through the first floor of the building, giving students a respite from winter as they walk through.

This change will come at a price: The new building will displace the "Turning Point" sculptures by the leading 20th-century American architect and Cleveland native Philip Johnson (no relation to Ralph Johnson).

The sculptures, a collection of five craggy, beige, abstract forms grouped around a key bend in the cross-campus path, need to move because the new building will anchor itself on the very spot they now occupy.

The sculptures will move to a new location close by, where they’ll be cradled in an elbow created by the new building and become a focal point in its design.

A second series of Philip Johnson sculptures in a garden east of the “Turning Point” will be undisturbed by the new project.

Campus planners have recognized for more than a decade that the “Turning Point” marked the spot where three branches of the present and future university intersect. These branches include the old WRU campus on the north side of Euclid Avenue, the Case Institute campus to the south and the planned West Campus, located to the west of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

As they studied possible locations for the university center, Ralph Johnson and Campbell said they had no alternative but to use the very spot Philip Johnson chose for his sculptures when they were installed in 2001.

It would have been most obvious to locate the new building directly north of the university’s Kelvin Smith Library on a large field now used for informal recreation and occasional special events.

But the field is actually the green roof of the underground parking garage, which serves the library and Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Campbell said it would have been impossible to build atop the garage, because its structure can’t support a heavier load and because it rests on a concrete platform set below the water table. Piercing the floor to create columns for a new building above the garage would have created endless leaks.

The team from Perkins + Will rejected the idea of building the university center on the old site of the former Freiberger Library, at the corner of Bellflower Road and East Boulevard, because it would have been too far from the CWRU center point.

The eccentric footprint of the university center, which resembles a starfish with a bite taken out of it, or perhaps a strange piece of origami, fits neatly into the land left over between the underground garage and a collection of 19th- and early 20th-century academic buildings further east and south, including Guilford House, home to the

Department of Modern Languages and Literature and

English.

By assuming its unusual shape, the building will give greater definition to the spaces around it by framing new campus quadrangles. These spaces, in turn, could attract greater use by students because they’ll feel more intimate and inviting and because the new building will generate activity around it.

Among other things, the university center will house a 9,000-square-foot ballroom — a gathering space larger than anything else on campus — plus meeting rooms for student organizations, a student dining area, a media lounge and a bar and restaurant open to the public.

“If you want space to be used, you have to put function next to it,” Johnson said.

Planners at CWRU have contemplated making a bell tower part of the new university center, but Johnson rejected the idea as unnecessary, and he said Snyder concurred.

The building will be enough of an icon without a tower.

“We have a groundscraper instead of a skyscraper,” Johnson said.