LAS VEGAS -- America's capital of gambling boasts an Eiffel Tower, an Arc de Triomphe and a Rialto Bridge.
Now it has a shiny new bragging point -- the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health-- housed in a stainless-steel explosion of a building designed by famed architect Frank Gehry.
The Clinic and the Keep Memory Alive Foundation, which supports the center, marked completion of the building Saturday with a gala for hundreds of wealthy donors.
"I knew from the beginning it [the building] would be a winner," Gehry said Saturday. "It needed, for this topic, to have a 'wow' thing to it. It couldn't just be a quiet little building."
The Clinic will use the center, donated by Las Vegas wine and liquor wholesaler Larry Ruvo in memory of his father, to treat patients with degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
The Clinic will also coordinate all its research on brain disorders from the center and may use it as the base for a much larger footprint in the city -- and the Southwest.
"This gives us an unparalleled opportunity to concentrate on neurodegenerative diseases and a great introduction to a new community and a new region of the U.S.," Clinic Chief Executive Officer Toby Cosgrove said Friday during a visit before a community open house.
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said the center "takes us to the next level" as a city. "To have a prestigious institute like the Cleveland Clinic associated with the serious side of Las Vegas is a feather in our cap and a good thing for the Cleveland Clinic as well," Goodman said.
The question is how much of a good thing the partnership can be for both sides.
The city wants the Clinic to establish an even stronger presence in Las Vegas to help anchor a major downtown revitalization project called Symphony Park and to broaden the city's economy beyond gambling and tourism, both weakened by the recession.
The city envisions Symphony Park as a dense, tree-lined, environmentally friendly expansion of downtown, with soaring office towers, thousands of residential apartments, a casino-hotel -- and a major medical center.
Today, the development is mostly 60 acres of sun-baked dirt sandwiched between the city's ragged downtown and Interstate 15.
The Ruvo center sits at the far south end of the site, just about a mile north of the famous Las Vegas Strip. Just to the north of the Ruvo center, the $470 million Smith Center for the Performing Arts, a multipurpose 2,050-seat concert hall, is well under construction.
From: Cleveland.com,22/05/2010
[slideshow]
Take a tour in the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77asXyejwFo]
