Landscape Information
Located west of University Circle, this 173-acre medical campus incorporates several gridded blocks between Chester and Cedar Avenues. Established in 1921 the institution expanded throughout the twentieth century, incrementally acquiring and developing contiguous residential lots. Open and unfenced, the campus is integrated into the surrounding community and includes a core of medical facilities, many of which are connected by enclosed, elevated walkways. In 2005 Peter Walker of PWP Landscape Architecture in Berkeley, CA, prepared a master plan with a ceremonial entry sequence, that provides visual and spatial cohesion and deploys a unifying design vocabulary that draws upon both formal French gardens and Modernist minimalism. The plan both integrates historic structures, such as the original Cleveland Clinic (1921) and the M Building (1924), as well as contemporary medical facilities, often in the Modernist style by such architects as Foster and Partners, Gresham Smith, and Cesar Pelli.
Approaching the campus along its northern axis via East 93rd Street, visitors proceed along an approximately 700-foot-long processional boulevard featuring a gridded allée of 298 columnar tulip polar trees. Running the length of this grand boulevard are six slightly sunken reflecting pools populated with a grid of 300 large Wisconsin granite stones. The interconnected pools gradually descend towards Euclid Avenue, an east-west boulevard that serves as the campus’ spine and is planted with allées of deciduous canopy trees. Evoking a minimalist sculpture, the linear reflecting pools acknowledge proposals made by Pelli in the 1980s for cascading water features on the campus grounds. On the south side of Euclid Avenue, on axis with the pools, is the clinic’s primary entrance, fronted by a circular drive. Here, Walker designed a minimalist 80-foot-wide water feature that appears to be floating that is sited as the terminating axis of the drive.
Bill Kiser, the former Chairman of Cleveland Clinic (1976-1989) noted that Walker’s “Masterful use of trees, stones and water created a welcoming, peaceful, comforting environment, a ‘sublime green space’, to greet worried, anxious, hopeful, disease laden patients of the future.”
