Frank Gehry, FAIA, Canadian-born top American architect and designer had always turned down commissions in Las Vegas, knowing that the city would inevitably turn his architecture into yet another theme. So when Larry Ruvo, a beverage entrepreneur, came calling, Gehry nearly turned him out. But Ruvo, a salesman on a crusade, won the architect over with the prospect of designing an Alzheimer’s research center in the emerging 61-acre Symphony Park, a development that aims to revitalize downtown Las Vegas, away from the lights of the Strip. The two made a deal. Gehry would design the building if Ruvo would include Huntington’s disease, which Gehry has long championed. With Gehry signed on, Ruvo—who had lost his father, Lou, to Alzheimer’s—tried to enlist a research institution that would occupy and run the building. “I believe that with a great building, people will come,” Ruvo says. In 2009, two years after construction started, the Cleveland Clinic signed on.

Now commanding the edge of the emerging cultural campus is a distinctly Gehry building, draped and wrapped with a mountainous metal-clad skin, faced in shingled panels and punctured with a grid of windows. The voluminous structure—which serves as a revenue-generating event space as well as a space for patient programs—stands at the back of an orthogonal, four-story working structure that serves as a clinic, research center, and Ruvo’s nonprofit Keep Memory Alive foundation headquarters.

With a technologically difficult and ambitious design on an idealistic mission, Gehry escaped the architecturally promiscuous ethos of the city, where architecture is, as analyzed in Learning from Las Vegas, a matter of decorating sheds with signage. “I met with the mayor, Oscar Goodman,” Gehry says. “He said to me, ‘Frank, you have to do something that’s not in Vegas. The Eiffel Tower is here, NYC is here. Do something that’s not in Vegas.’ So we used to say I was creating the mouse that roared.” And according to director Jeffrey Cummings, the center inspires its occupants: “When we go to work in a sculptural masterpiece, it has the effect of making you want to live up to the expectations established by the building. ”The composite 60,000-square-foot complex is basically composed of two radically different buildings joined by a partially clad steel trellis shading an outdoor patio. 

Gehry delivered the architectural gravitas that Ruvo needed. “For me, architecture was a necessary marketing tool,” Ruvo says. “We wanted a statement that would show we were serious about curing a disease and would let the doctors know we were not underfunded.” Ruvo uses the architecture as a symbol to rally donations and volunteers, while the activity center generates a steady income stream, playing host to weddings, galas (including the foundation’s own), and other upscale happenings. “I told Frank that I was going to put his celebrity and talent to use to help cure chronic brain diseases,” Ruvo says. Gehry understood the need. “The building is very successful because it brought attention to the foundation, it linked Larry up with the Cleveland Clinic, and it helps him get grants. That wouldn’t have happened” otherwise, he says. (Videos, here )