When I heard of architect Frank Gehry’s passing , the visual moment that returned to me was not a famous building in Bilbao or Los Angeles, but a winter morning in University Circle.

I was high in the bell tower of the Church of the Covenant, doing routine maintenance. The top of the tower opens into a broad stone platform, roughly twenty feet square, rimmed at waist height. It’s a place of work — ropes, dust, and stone — not a lookout.

When I walked to the edge of that open platform, Cleveland unfolded below me: the lagoon, the art museum, Severance Hall, and the long horizontal line of Lake Erie on the horizon.

Then I saw it.

The Peter B. Lewis Building wasn’t flamboyant from that height. It was quiet. Silver ribbons catching sunlight. A curve of metal in conversation with the rest

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