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Hot Property: Colorplast North American headquarters
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Where: 1601 West River Road, Minneapolis
Type: Office
Size: 192,000 square feet
Area: 5.4 acres
Cost: $33.5 million
General contractor: Kraus-Anderson Construction
Details: A year after starting work on the new North American headquarters of Danish medical device company Coloplast, the 192,000-square foot office complex is set for a dedication and grand opening this week, Kraus-Anderson Construction Co. says.
The project includes a new 90,000-square-foot, five-story tower that employs European-style office design techniques in which the plenums housing air circulation ducts, electric cables and data lines are placed under the floor to provide each workspace with its own heating and air-conditioning controls. Because the setup eliminates the use of walls and ceilings to carry infrastructure, it allows the maximum flexibility in office layout as the user's office needs change, said K-A Vice President Bill Jarvis, who heads the builder's life sciences division.
"What we did was to take the same kind of flexibility found in research and development labs, where they're always changing things as one experiments ends and another begins, and adapt that to an office setting," Jarvis said. "That ability to easily modify office space for future needs really is a key in making a building that works nowadays, and while the ideas have been around for a while in Europe, you don't see them too often in big offices here."
The complex also includes a new 37,000-square-foot "link" building that connects the tower with a 65,000-square-foot building remaining on the site from Coloplast's predecessor company, Mentor Corp. That one-story facility, which was built 36 years ago and featured a drab, precast concrete façade, has been extensively remodeled and given a new exterior that matches the sleek look of the new structures.
The Coloplast complex will house 300 workers and is seen as an important part of Minneapolis' efforts to spark an economic resurgence along the Mississippi River on the North Side. While its location next to the river provides impressive views for workers and an aesthetic landmark for the city, it also necessitated the use of fill and pilings to support the buildings' weight.
Another aspect of the effort was installation of massive, below-grade storm-water retention tanks under the parking lot, which will be used to filter out sediment before the runoff is allowed to flow into the river, Jarvis said.
DON JACOBSON
Don Jacobson, a freelance writer based in St. Paul, can be contacted at hotproperty.startribune@gmail.com.
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