Streetscapes: Toro headquarters reflects the company's design ethos

Passing through a wide hallway of Toro's headquarters in Bloomington, visitors can take in the company's "Walk of History."

Vintage models of Toro products are parked along the corridor — a farm tractor, a Silver Flash push lawn mower, candy-red snow throwers, even a turquoise golf cart. While the discontinued products offer fascinating glimpses into the past, it's the abundance of simple, tried-and-true designs that really impress.

Appropriately, the design for the company's newly expanded headquarters builds on a time-tested tradition of suburban architecture, with award-winning results.

During its 100-year history, Toro has continually invented and retooled its catalog of landscape-maintenance equipment at its product-development labs on Lyndale Avenue South near Interstate 494.

Not that most people even knew it was there. Built in a wide, low valley, the sprawling one-story brick and concrete-clad structure was effectively hidden from view.

That changed last June when the company opened its new addition, and Toro's international headquarters suddenly popped into view. Facing a new entry off Lyndale and W. American Boulevard, the three-story office and training facility straddles a perfectly manicured lawn, its broad expanse of reflective glass mirroring the suburban sky.

Textured dark gray concrete, rusty brown metal panels and perforated aluminum screens make for an earthy, industrial aesthetic not usually applied to corporate headquarters. But for Toro, with its down-to-earth business focus, it signals an architectural message sure to resonate equally well with its engineering-minded employees, and groundskeeping customer base.

Smartly detailed and appropriate to its situation, the addition won over a jury of national architects who in November granted it an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects' Minnesota chapter. Well-proportioned and impeccably detailed, it is not, however, groundbreaking architecture. Rather, the building is a continuation of a recurring trope within the modernist architecture tradition, the "machine in the garden."

The project designers at the Minneapolis office of Leo A Daly architects, led by design principal Bill Baxley and project architect Steve Andersen, draw comparisons between the new building and the line of Toro's landscape equipment — machines that have an internal structure based on functional needs, wrapped in a shell or housing that protects the stuff inside and makes a visual impression. Likewise, the internal arrangement of offices, conference rooms, bathrooms — and the steel skeleton that supports them — all get wrapped in a kind of protective cowl or hood.

Boxy, with a slightly retro feel, the building recalls the golden era of corporate modernism, when midcentury boom companies like IBM, General Mills and Bell Telephone decamped from downtowns and built international-style campuses on the suburban frontier.

The telltale traits of modularity, repetition and the appearance of weightlessness connect Toro's new building to the longer modernist tradition. Baxley injects the design with a sense of playfulness and humanity that earlier "serious" modernist buildings lacked.

Ornament in the conventional sense is largely avoided. The texture or pattern of the raw materials provides visual interest. The element that balances the rough-and-tumble character of the architecture is the parklike site. Gently rolling hills, placid ponds and the mature suburban hardwood forest provide the serene "garden" into which the civilizing building (the "machine") is foreground.

Inside, it's a different story. Machined elements such as exposed steel I-beam columns and stainless steel handrails stand out in a pristine gallery-like environment of white Venetian plaster walls, snowy terrazzo floors and slatted wood ceilings. Where the new structure connects to the existing building (and its "Walk of History"), a new ground-level concourse works like a glassed-in breezeway. On either side of the concourse, large areas of window can slide open, allowing even the largest Toro tractor to roll inside the building and into an adjacent conference room.

Some unexpected design choices keep the interior lively. Mirrored chrome door frames at the vestibule contrast markedly with the dark gray storefront on the exterior. An inch thick, two-story-tall steel plate — painted Toro red — anchors a glassy connecting stair between floors. And on the upper level a rooftop terrace is neatly tucked out of view, yet offers workers a dose of fresh air and panoramic views of the surrounding tree tops, as well as the building's planted green roofs.

While much of the architectural excitement in the Twin Cities today is focused on work in the downtown cores, it is refreshing to see an architect and a company like Toro reinvigorate the art of the modern suburban headquarters. True to its origins, the company's new headquarters building isn't a reinvention — it does the hard job of taking something that already works and making it better.

Phillip Glenn Koski is a Minneapolis architect and writer.