CAF Video Initiative - William Blunden, FAIA

Bill Blunden FAIA was the design partner in the revered Blunden & Barclay Architects firm while Barclay was the firm’s business partner and construction/ technical director. Cleveland architecture critic James M. Wood cited the firm’s “commendable ability to think small.”

Blunden decided at age 12 that he wanted to be an architect. At age 14, he was working as an office boy in an architectural firm in hometown Lima, OH. In 1958, he earned his bachelor of architecture degree at Ohio State University before a tour of duty in Army Intelligence and then completing his graduate studies at Cornell University. Blunden then began his architecture career in New York City with Edward Durrell Stone, one of America’s noteworthy modern architects (1902 – 1978), and came to Cleveland to work with Dalton Dalton.

Blunden and Barclay met in 1970 while working for Don Hisaka FAIA (1928-2013), one of Cleveland’s best architects. In 1974, Blunden and Barclay left Hisaka’s firm to start their own practice and for 32 years, the two worked together and established lasting relationships with numerous clients. After building a $4,000 staircase for Allen Memorial Medical Library at Case Western Reserve University in the 1970’s, the firm spent the next 20 years completing various renovations within the historic building designed in 1926 by Cleveland’s premier Beaux Arts architects, Walker and Weeks. Blunden Barclay also completed multiple projects for John Carroll University, Laurel School, Cleveland Public Library, University Hospitals and the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Blunden is a modernist who values lightness, openness, clarity and attention to detail, who achieved exceptional purity in the design of Z Contemporary Cuisine in Cleveland’s Tower East. Located on the ground floor of the Shaker Heights office tower designed by Bauhaus master Walter Gropius, the restaurant created a serene environment that chef Zachary Bruell found “almost Zen.”

The strikingly modern Blunden Barclay fire station in Oberlin led to commissions for the award-winning Oberlin City Hall, a bridge over Plum Creek and the renovation of Finney Chapel, the 1908 Cass Gilbert landmark at Oberlin College. The firm received dozens of additional awards, and its work has been featured in many publications. Although Blunden and his partnerpreferred to design contemporary buildings, they showed deep respect for historic styles in renovation projects and also in commissions from traditional Western Reserve communities. The Village Hall and Hunt Club in Hunting Valley and a civic/commercial complex in Gates Mills stayed true to principles of Greek revival architecture.

After designing an office interior for Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove in 2005, Blunden was asked to design the Table 45 restaurant. Cosgrove then asked Blunden to guide the design of the $634 million Miller and Glickman Pavilions. From 2007 until 2018, Blunden oversaw the design of all of the Clinic’s projects, making sure that the set the Clinic’s new brand identity of “calmness and tranquility.”

William Peacock, the Cleveland Clinic's executive director of facilities construction and real estate, observed that Blunden found a gentle way of improving the work of the architects he's paired with: "I really hate to say this, because I'm afraid I'll offend them," Peacock said, "but I think he [Blunden] makes them better. He makes them stop and think about the details." Peacock added, "You go down any hospital corridor," and you see that "we have a tendency to hang everything off the wall and it becomes so much visual noise, so much clutter. He [Blunden] has done a great job knocking that back and driving it to the essential minimal [look] that we place on walls and surfaces."

Ultimately, the look is an extension of Cosgrove's desire to use architecture as a way to facilitate healing. "I feel that he's a very trustworthy extension of my thinking," Cosgrove said of Blunden. "The thing I've learned from him is how important details are and how hard you have to work at something to get it to turn out the way you want," Cosgrove said. Cosgrove also said he admires Blunden's ability to work collaboratively with other architects in a role that could potentially lead to tension.

"He does it very well," Cosgrove said. "He listens, he lets people express their opinion; they have a lot of healthy discussion, sometimes lively. But nonetheless, everybody I've talked to has great respect for him."

Video Interview: Scheduled for Fall 2020