The Vontz Center for Molecular Studies
UC Medical Campus, M.L. King Drive
northwest corner Eden Avenue,Corryville;
Frank Gehry; 1997-99

The Albert H. Vontz Center for Molecular Studies, a neurological sciences and cancer research laboratory, brings the Signature Architect program to the University's East or Medical Campus, integrating the city's historic medical center into Hargreaves' unified Clifton-Corryville campus plan (see 12). The Vontz Center provides a new gateway - and at night a beacon - to the hospital complex, in which teaching, research, and medical practice are fruitfully combined.

Appropriately, the Vontz Center resulted equally from collaboration, between the client, Donald C. Harrison, M.D., UC Provost for Heath Affairs; architect Frank O. Gehry (born 1929) and his associates of Santa Monica; local firm Baxter Hodell Donnelly Preston, Inc. (BHDP); and Earl Walls, the leading authority on laboratory design. Recognizing the need for infinitely flexible support functions, Walls employs two-story, 20-foot-high labs that incorporate "interstitial" utilities floors accessible from overhead catwalks; these are reflected in the scale of Gehry's innovative exterior cladding of contextual red-brick panels pre-laid on computer-curved templates.

The basic layout of the Vontz Center resembles a butterfly. Circulation, administration, and public activities, as well as a display honoring Cincinnatian Dr. Albert Sabin, inventor of an oral polio vaccine, are all accessible from the dramatic spiraling staircases and balconies in the interior of the central "body." The basically rectangular labs form the wings; they are contained within the bulging brick exterior forms, but burst through the skin as "innies" and "outies": gridded glass-and-aluminum window planes and skylights that light the central well and peripheral corridors. Toward the Main Campus, on the southwest, a broad, wide-angled flight of brick stairs opens out to a landscaped plaza, which ties the Vontz Center visually to the rectilinear adjacent Procter Hall of the College of Nursing and Health (Woodie Garber;1966) and the Kingsgate Conference Center/University Hall (1997-99; Walsh, Higgins & Co., with VOA Assocs. and BHDP).

Contemporary with Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Vontz Center reveals the architect's swooping sculptural forms, sometimes whimsical associative references (Cincinnati's notorious origins as "Porkopolis" seem to have been invoked here), willingness to explore new structural and material technologies, and creative response to practical programs, here reflecting the burgeoning field of bio-medicine. Tours available.