- Henning
- Larsen
Located across from Minneapolis City Hall, the new multi-purpose building design will add human scale to the site and meet the public at eye level. The building will offer an accessible layout that puts the citizens’ needs front-and-center—creating a welcoming environment while providing modern, light-filled, airy and green workspaces for the City’s employees.
“We have come up with a design vision which supports the idea of placing the citizen first: enabling easy, open and secure access for improved comfort and service. We are optimizing the flow of people and daylight for increased transparency while connecting the building with the city, and accommodating future needs for an efficient and modern work environment for the City’s employees,” says Nina La Cour Sell, Partner at Henning Larsen.
The design approach, influenced by our Scandinavian ethos, focuses on creating collaborative and innovative workspaces, integrated sustainability, and highlighting daylight as a human right and contributor to a healthy workplace.
Green collaboration zones and open stair connections between departments will transform the workplace from introverted functions and departments into shared spaces and new communities that encourage knowledge sharing. Each workstation will have a comfortable flow of natural light coming through an optimized façade system for employee well-being.
Taking inspiration from the region’s abundant green spaces and recreational areas, the design team infuses the same attractiveness at city scale, creating a green, open space that creates an inviting gesture towards City Hall and activating the street level and plaza. Based on climatic simulations and analysis, the massing of the building is oriented to minimize wind exposure and optimize daylight to the City Hall Plaza –further guiding people from the skyway through the heart of the building.
Construction of the new 7-10 story building is expected to be completed by the fall 2020. The building will include 250,000 – 300,000 square feet of interior space, and is designed to accommodate several hundred employees.
The building is being designed to achieve LEED Gold certification.
Together with MSR, we were selected through a competitive four-stage process that began in March 2017 and included a Request for Qualifications, a Request for Proposals and two rounds of interviews. The project is the first to be designed out of our New York office.
Our project team includes Nina La Cour Sell, Michael Sørensen, Mike McElderry, Stephanie Rogowski, Jake Spruit, Tessira Crawford, Grant McCracken, Mark David Hocking, Julian Chen, Jakob Strømann-Andersen, Mathias Sønderskov, Anne Iversen, Franck Fdida, Philip Deeg, and Ana Cubillos-Torres.