Critic Singles Out a Campus ‘Background Building’ for Praise

The architecture critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Steven Litt, has a number of good things to say about Case Western Reserve University’s new Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations, designed by Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood Architects, of Boston. But what he likes best about the building is that it plays well with others.

The two-story, $11.6-million building (right) “shows how you can have solid, contemporary architecture and a strong, neighborhood-sensitive design that fits well in its setting,” says Mr. Litt. The building “sits comfortably along Bellflower Road amid a collection of late 19th-century frat houses built in a variety of revival styles ranging from Tudor to Queen Anne.”

Not all of the university’s buildings make such good neighbors. Two blocks away is Frank Gehry’s high-profile fantasia for the Weatherhead School of Management, which Mr. Litt describes as exploding “with optimism and energy” — but which nevertheless is a bad fit with the residential scale of the neighborhood (Mr. Mandel politely says it “is cramped by the stingy site assigned to it”).

Meanwhile, he notes that the Mandel Center’s entrance “creates a visual rhyme with that of the Shingle Style house next door” and that its tan bricks “echo those of other, more traditional buildings nearby.” And an appealing open courtyard, he adds, helps make up for the loss of a community garden that neighbors fought to save.