Minnehaha Academy unveiled sleek new designs Friday to rebuild and replace the century-old brick buildings damaged in last summer's deadly gas explosion.
The 100,000-square-foot additions won't just revamp the face of the private Minneapolis school. They will nearly double the amount of space, allowing the school to prepare for a growing student population and potentially add middle-school classes.
"It's a wonderful time for us to re-imagine our school," said Minnehaha Academy President Donna Harris. "It's an exciting time."
The new designs come just seven months after the August blast that killed a receptionist and custodian and injured nine people. The natural gas explosion collapsed part of the brick building, the oldest part of the Upper School campus.
Now, Minnehaha Academy leaders want to start anew with three Scandinavian-inspired buildings at the upper campus along the Mississippi River, reopening by fall 2019. A lower and middle school is about a mile south, housing 450 preschool through eighth-grade students.
In preliminary designs revealed Friday to students and faculty, the additions will be connected and have a light fiber-cement paneled exterior with big windows, reflecting the aesthetic of the school's Scandinavian founders. They will also face the river — a stark contrast to the previous red brick buildings built in 1913 and 1922.
"It looks like a campus," Upper School Principal Jason Wenschlag said. "It provides a nice design contrast."
The new design will double the space of the former 55,000-square-foot building, with a library and more open spaces such as nooks by windows for spaces to study or cafe-style tables. The additions will hold 745 middle and high school students — considerably more than the 350 ninth- through 12th-grade students who were there before. That's because school officials hope to increase the student population over time and are exploring moving sixth- through eighth-grade classes from the Lower School campus to be physically near the high school, as some other private schools in the Twin Cities do.