Inside Track, Feb. 18: Cuningham Group designed Olympics venue

Minneapolis-based Cuningham Group Architecture designed the home of the Winter Olympics in South Korea.

The Alpensia Resort in Pyeongchang, which was completed in 2009, originally was commissioned by the Korean government in hopes of winning the 2014 Winter Games. Instead, they went to Russia.

Jim Scheidel, a California-based principal with Cuningham who supervised Alpensia's design, said the project was conceived as an international resort and recreation destination and is nestled in two adjacent valleys in Korea's Gangwodo province.

Scheidel recalled Apensia was a public-private investment that probably cost more than $250 million.

It includes a five-star hotel and wellness center, two other hotels, water park, conference center, sports facilities, ski jumps and several hundred residences.

"I remember walking the site in about 2006," Scheidel said on Friday. "It was just potato fields.

"Now, the eyes of the world will be on Alpensia and its many exceptional venues."

Cuningham was founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by John Cuningham, who plans to retire later this year. It is one of the 15 largest architectural firms in the United States.

The firm, with 2017 revenue of about $100 million, employs 400 at its St. Anthony Main headquarters on the east bank of the Mississippi River, and at offices in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix, Seoul, Beijing and elsewhere.

Neal St. Anthony

The Minnesota Department of Commerce Monday released an amended environmental review of Enbridge's controversial new Line 3 oil pipeline, though it includes no major changes.

In December, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission rejected the commerce department's Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on a handful of narrow concerns. The PUC gave the department 60 days to make clarifications.

The new Line 3 would follow the path of the current pipeline to Clearbrook, Minn., but it would then jog south to Park Rapids before heading east to Superior. Environmental groups and Indian tribes oppose the new Line 3, saying it would open a new region of lakes and rivers to possible degradation from oil spills.

They have asked the PUC to reconsider its December decision on the EIS, claiming the document should be rejected because it is fundamentally flawed, lacking among other things an assessment of large oil spills.

The PUC is expected to hear their reconsideration arguments later this week.

While the PUC declared the EIS "inadequate," it did so on more technical grounds. The PUC essentially asked the commerce department for more information on alternative routes to Enbridge's preferred path for Line 3.

The PUC is slated to vote again on the EIS in March. The commission is expected in June to make a ruling on the larger issue of whether the pipeline is needed.

St. Louis-based Caleres, the footwear firm that acquired Allen Edmonds for $225 million in late 2016, will close a Bloomington marketing and merchandising office opened by the former CEO of Wisconsin-based Edmonds.

"We made the decision to close the [suburban] Minneapolis office of Allen Edmonds, which impacted 17 employees," Malcolm Robinson, the men's division president of Caleres, said in a statement in response to a Star Tribune inquiry. "All employees were offered the opportunity to relocate to St. Louis in their position or apply for other open ones."

The Minneapolis regional office, including former marketers and merchandisers from the former Dayton's Department Stores, was opened by former Allen Edmonds CEO Paul Grangaard, who retired in 2017 after helping revive the company after a near collapse during the Great Recession.

Grangaard, a veteran Twin Cities financial executive at Piper Jaffray and private-equity firm Goldner Hawn Johnson & Morrison, stepped in as CEO of the shoemaker in 2008.

Allen Edmonds, which has become increasingly more profitable since 2010, saw employment nearly double by 2017 to 750.

Last December, Brentwood sold Edmonds for $225 million to Caleres, which owns Famous Footwear and other shoe firms.