LlamaLawyer

I hope this doesn't include the middle building with the ornate facade. It looks like it could be quite beautiful with a good power wash.

I’m not sure I can recall ever hearing better news for the region than this. 20,000 jobs is 2% of the entire metro. Seriously, if this pans out as predicted, what development in the past 20 years will have been so impactful??

This all sounds fine except the public square part. That sounds awful.

Actually, THE most important part about every downtown development is how nice does it look from Parma. 😤

One can only hope this means no Public Square paint museum.

Here's a digital render of the design @Paul in Cleveland posted above. To beat fully to death the point I've been making above, I think if you took the facade style off this building and put it on the BOK Park Plaza shape, you could have a very attractive, even "stunning" building. But again, as @KJP said, we don't even have a site plan yet...

This is a great example of what I've been saying above that small details make a big impact on a simple building. Just like the above building is very simple but with interesting "trim" so to speak. We could see a design which is "very similar" to the BOK Park Place building but has design details that set it apart and make it shine. I'm looking forward to real renderings.

Wow, I love it. My only critique is I wish there was something like this downtown!

Thanks @KJPfor the very thorough and helpful comment above. I think it provides context that should assuage some of our worst fears for this project. I've said it before and I'll say it again. As frustrating as the idea that details are up in the air is for all of us, it is probably a good thing for those who want a large, impressive project. When you're a company whose DTE ratio is trending like the below, your CFO probably loosens up his or her tie a little bit. So as time goes on, there is every reason to expect an HQ project to get bigger and grander, not smaller.

Over the last ten minutes, my attempted optimism about a paint museum has fully faded based on this one fact: If a paint museum were a big failure (good bet), there is basically zero chance SHW would have the humility or the motivation to do something better with the land. It wouldn't get torn down in a couple years. It would probably be a stupid paint museum for at least thirty years. Design team, if you're listening, in the next twelve months, the Jacobs Lot will probably be worth more than what you paid for it. You can maybe sell it for a profit! If you're not going to put a tower on the lot, then sell it to a company/Russian oligarch/Miami cocaine baron who will.

The 92,000 sq. ft. relates to the world of Coca Cola. The size of this building is unknown. 92,000 sq. ft., by the way, is nearly twice the size of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exhibit hall. No way SHW could even half of that with interesting exhibits. Coca Cola and rock 'n' roll are huge for memorabilia, kitschy items, and other museum crap. It is within the realm of possibility that SHW could make a world class museum . . . but it would be hard.

Frankly, if they want to do the museum thingy, one story is fine with me. My biggest fear would be something on the Jacobs lot in the ten story range where it's too short to be remotely in scale with Key-200-TT but tall enough that replacing it becomes expensive. This museum could be a huge swing and miss. I mean....it's paint.

I just hope in any event that they . . . look critically at the museum. Corporate museums vary. I could see this being a nice addition to our collection of wonderful local museums on the upside or just kind of dumb on the downside. If we have a world-class museum on public square long term, that kind of makes sense and could be nice. If the museum turns out to be primarily a dumb, pandering attraction for kids to visit in the second half of take-your-kid-to-work day . . . yeah . . . Then I just hope the folks at SHW are honest enough to recognize that fact and sell the land so that maybe 15 years from now we can get a tower that actually does rival Key Tower. They only paid $9 million, which is less than 2% of their total construction budget. After their drilling, costs may indicate the other lots are cheaper to build on.

✅ 600 foot building ✅ Not actually on the square, so people who hate the design can still get an iconic skyscraper on the square in the future. ✅ Jacobs lot filled by building intended primarily to have good street level interaction, also likely small enough that demolishing for future expansion wouldn’t be a big deal. If this is all true, sign me up.

I don't hate (or love) a glass box, but man this thread rn:

My point is that it's not going to be exactly the same. Even shot-for-shot remakes aren't the same. If they were, the Psycho remake would get all the praise of the original. Someone on the design team said it will be "nearly identical" per @KJP. I don't know who that person is. If it's the lead architect, you could maybe draw a conclusion, but what if it's the lead glass procurement guy. Maybe it's someone at SHW's corporate image department who knows less about architecture than the average person on this forum. That's why I put the two images of the buildings above. They are extremely similar but illustrate how small design details make a big difference in appearance.

3. would be very troubling. 2. could be very troubling or could simply be sources working with incomplete information and getting confused. As to 1., I will say again that I think people are being overly critical of a design we haven't actually seen. I think BOK Park Place is nice (and two top "floors" lit up would look great in Cleveland's skyline at night!), but just because the HQ could be modeled on it doesn't mean we can envision how the HQ would actually look in situ. Take these two buildings: Both of these buildings are Pickard Chilton, and you could certainly say they are very similar. In all likelihood one was modeled off the other. The details on the buildings create very different presentations, however. To my eye, the second is much nicer looking and more interesting even though at a high level it's the same as the first building. So assuming everything @KJP heard is accurate and BOK is the model, I will still hold off judgment until we see actual renders.

Is it possible some of the information is confused and the BOK building is really the model for the second tower? If so, could the model for the Public Square tower perhaps be the Devon Energy Center which sits right next to BOK in OKC? Just questions, because I don't know how firm your sources were with their information. But it would make sense. While I don't hate the design of BOK like most people apparently do here, it is a little strange given how some of your previous sources had gushed over how beautiful the render was. Specifically thinking of this from your Nov. 6 article: "Stunning, evocative of an East Coast especially New York-style of architecture. Very modern. Building height was about the size of the 200 Public Square but could be taller based on the angle of the rendering. There was a decorative element at the top but could've been for rooftop equipment." I'm just not understanding how these pieces fit together.

Jeez, you all are very negative about a building we don’t even have renders of. It doesn’t sound like this will be exactly identical to BOK, and small details make big differences on a minimalist building. Also, while I’ve never seen the BOK building in person, looking at some renders shows a few details that would be far more apparent in person and really make the building pop. Simplicity does not mean poor design. The twin towers were as simple as could be from a distance and they stood like two silver gods.

There's a little gap on the south side by B2B, but that has some patios and a very useful pedestrian path, so not sure it really counts.

Woot! Three cheers for Euclid never again looking like this!

Thanks for the link. Here are some conceptual renders for the F&C plan.

I actually think this is great depending on what they do with the space. If the leave the parcel as is, yeah that would be gross, but it could be a cute little park with minimal effort. That parcel and the tiny parking lot across from it are really the only underused parcels fronting on Lee from the high school down to the library. The little third-acre parcel doesn't currently detract from the area's walkability in a meaningful way, and a little park there will only increase the walkability of the area. Finally, there's more than enough area to develop in the massive parking lot next to the why-is-it-even-here parking garage (soon to be the ok-it-does-have-a-purpose parking garage). The F&C proposal sounds great and I hope it goes full speed ahead. This should encounter less pushback than TOH did because it's a less prominent site and there are far fewer residents immediately adjacent. Nevertheless, it wouldn't be Cleveland Heights if a few folks didn't find something to whine about. Next up Severance!

https://www.cleveland19.com/2021/01/11/nighttown-restaurant-music-venue-change-hands/ Rico Pietro of Cushman Wakefield is the buyer of Nighttown. Still unclear who the lead chef will be, although not Michael Symon (which, all love to Symon aside, is probably a good thing for the restaurant's continuity). Supposedly the plan is to keep the restaurant mostly unchanged but with some "modest functional renovations." This sounds like a win so long as the new chef has the humility not to screw around with the menu too much. I would wonder if it will be Doug Katz, who just lost his old flagship and has been testing waters in the area recently with his new place Zhug about 100 feet down the road.

Pretty sure Bon Appetit operates the Dunkin which is next door, so the reference to Dunkin could also be an inartful reference to that fact. As some trivia, Bon Appetit currently operates every single restaurant on CWRU campus (recognizing that the lines of "campus" are pretty fuzzy). The law school used to have Munch, an independent kosher place, but they were pushed out in favor of Bon Appetit a few years ago.