Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center

Date

2016-present

Location

10 E. College Street

Architects/Collaborators

Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB), Chicago, San Francisco (architects)
Albert M. Higley Company, Cleveland, OH (contractor)
Maya Lin Studio, New York, NY; Tan Lin, Edwina von Gal (artists/designers/poet)

Style

Modern

History

Groundbreaking for the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center took place on June 12, 2014, and was dedicated in October 2016. The four-story complex includes the 70-suite Hotel at Oberlin, its restaurant, 1833, the Wiliam and Helen Birenbaum Innovation and Performance Space, the Clyde McGregor '74 Office of Admissions, Lemle Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence, and StudiOC. The Center is the cornerstone of Oberlin's Green Arts District, an ongoing development encompassing the northeast corner of North Main Street and East College Street. The Lewis Gateway Center is a 104,000 square-foot, mixed-use development that incorporates renewable energy systems, and meets the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Platinum rating. The Center won the 2019 Distinguished Building Award from the American Institute of Architects.

The Gateway Center is named for its major donor, Peter B. Lewis, whose $5 million gift is the single largest contribution in Oberlin's campaign for support of the Green Arts District, and came in the form of a challenge that was successfully matched by other donors. Lewis, who launched Progressive Insurance, funded a number of pioneering building projects in Cleveland. His son Adam Lewis was the largest donor for the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies built in 2000. Thus father and son Lewis were "instrumental in bringing Oberlin to the forefront of the ecological design movement," in the words of David W. Orr, the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and senior advisor to the president of Oberlin College.

Installations in the hotel lobby, the landscape and parking lot were designed by artist Maya Lin and collaborator James Ewart; her brother, the poet Tan Lin; and landscape artist Edwina von Gal. The installation, entitled An Ecological Primer: A landscape in 3 parts, is a collaborative work focused on climate and landscape--the final part of Maya Lin's "Ohio Trilogy." An Ecological Primer uses landscape as a device to discuss releasing human control of land, honoring the water we depend on to survive, and issues of migration raised by climate change. 

Sources

Oberlin College, Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center, Distinguished Building Award, Design Excellence Awards, American Institute of Architects website, accessed February 28, 2020.

"Gateway Center Installation Completes 'Ohio Trilogy'," The Oberlin Review, October 28, 2016, accessed online February 28, 2020.

Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center, Oberlin College website, accessed November 9, 2017.

"Oberlin Names New Hotel and Conference Center in Honor of Peter B. Lewis," The Oberlin News Center (web), Oberlin College, February 25, 2014, accessed May 22, 2015.

"Update: The Oberlin Project," Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Vol. 110 No. 3, Summer 2015, 4.

Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB) website, accessed May 22, 2015.