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PAU will lead a team to extend I.M. Pei’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now

PAU will lead a team to extend I.M. Pei’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Although it remains temporarily shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic, there are big plans in store for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. (Practice for Architecture and Urbanism)

Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) has won a competition to design a planned 50,000-square expansion of I.M. Pei’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The firm, based in New York, will lead a larger team that includes landscape architecture and urban design practice James Corner Field Operations, architecture firm Cooper Robertson, and lighting design and consulting firm L’Observatoire International.

Following an extensive schematic design phase spearheaded by PAU and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, construction on the $100 million museum extension is set to kick off in early 2022 with Robert Madison International, the largest Black woman-owned architecture firm in Ohio, and DLR Group serving as architects of record.

In a statement referencing hits by at least three Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees, Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder and creative director of PAU, said: “Rock and Roll—like NASA and pizza—brings us together like few other cultural phenomena at this moment when our nation needs to come together. We are beyond ecstatic to have been selected by the Rock Hall to design the expansion of I.M. Pei’s heart of glass, which sits aglow upon Cleveland’s storied industrial waterfront, particularly in light of the architectural luminaries against whom we had the honor of competing. This is PAU’s stairway to heaven.”

overhead view of a building plan
Site plan of the expansion project at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. (Practice for Architecture and Urbanism)

This is the second major PAU-headed project in the Midwest to be announced in a matter of just a matter of days. On December 10, it was revealed that the firm had been selected to co-lead, with schlaich bergermann partner, the design of a signature bridge for the mixed-use 16 Tech Innovation District in Indianapolis. In mid-November, the PAU-developed site plan for Ford’s 30-acre Michigan Central redevelopment scheme in Detroit was also made public along with other elements of the transformative, neighborhood-fusing project.

With both the 16 Tech bridge and Rock & Roll Hall expansion, PAU was in the running alongside other notable contenders. (They included Snøhetta, MVRDV, Behnisch Architekten, and Kennedy & Violich Architecture for the former project.) For the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame expansion, PAU and its partners were in competition against a number of “world-class firms”—in total, the museum had submitted an RFQ to 22 top architecture and design practices before ultimately selecting PAU and its project partners to take on the expansion in a unanimous decision. As noted in a news release, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame believed the PAU-led team “best met the needs of the Rock Hall in terms of contemplating a building that would channel the energy of Rock and Roll, excite future visitors, inspire donors and supporters, pay homage to the existing I.M. Pei building and address the Hall’s spatial needs.”

illustration of a rock concert
The PAU-designed expansion will bring new outdoor performance and event spaces to the Cleveland lakefront. (Practice for Architecture and Urbanism)

Among other elements, the expansion will include interactive classrooms, additional indoor event spaces for performances and community gatherings, on-site archives, and an additional 10,000 square feet of space dedicated to large-scale traveling exhibitions. The revamp will also entail establishing new outdoor event and programming spaces as well as a proper museum campus with the neighboring Great Lakes Science Center on downtown Cleveland’s Lake Erie shorefront. The current footprint of Pei’s 25-year-old pyramidic museum is 150,000-square-feet.

“Our impact has been great on visitors, students and the community over the last 25 years, and it’s now time to expand our physical space,” said Greg Harris, president and CEO of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in a statement. “We are excited to join with PAU, one of the world’s top architectural design firms, as we build on this success and look forward to the next 100 years.”

aerial sketch of a museum building
(Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, James Corner Field Operations)

After reopening in June following a months-long, pandemic-induced closure, the museum once again temporarily shuttered its doors to the public on November 23 in response to a new surge of COVID-19 cases. Originally scheduled for May 2, the 35th annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony was also scratched and replaced with an HBO special that debuted on November 7. The 2020 Inductee Class included Depeche Mode, Whitney Houston, the Notorious B.I.G., Nine Inch Nails, the Doobie Brothers, and Ahmet Ertegun Award honorees Jon Landau and Irving Azoff. As noted by the New York Times, it has been—like with countless other cultural institutions—a particularly hard year for the museum, which has lost an estimated $14 million in revenue due, in large part, to lost ticketed admission sales.

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