More than a year after preservationists, designers, architects and environmental advocates banded together and presented a case to adaptively reuse the Breuer Tower, K&D Group, the developers who bought the tower and the Ameritrust site from the county, have inked a deal for a boutique hotel to occupy 14 floors of the tower.

This move promises to elevate Cleveland to the center of an important national debate about Modern architecture. This month, Metropolis features the fight over renovating JPMorgan Chase headquarters, a modernist classic in New York. They write:

The dispute between environmentalists and preservationists is whether these twentieth-century artifacts should be seen as building blocks of embedded energy, salvaged only to the extent practical, or if the integrity of the design is worth consideration.

K&D and its architects at Westlake Reed Leskosky (which worked with Breuer on his tower design) are poised to show the world how a city in the midst of rebuilding its image places value on design and existing resources.

This is the second big piece in place for the revitalization of Cleveland’s most important address—E. 9th Street and Euclid Avenue. One week before this latest coup, K&D completed the purchase of the old Wm. Taylor & Sons department store at 668 Euclid, which they plan to restore as apartments and ground-floor commercial space.