Archives

1. KSMQ PBS Broadcast Center

   This new broadcast center and headquarters for KSMQ, a PBS member station, serves southeast Minnesota and northeast Iowa. Designed for flexibility, the front portion of the building can be closed off to give outside groups access to conference rooms during off hours without the need for KSMQ staff supervision. The studio features a robotic camera system. A terrazzo floor mural and sliding art wall showcase art by local artists. The center also includes an outdoor stage and lawn for live performances.

   The facility was designed and constructed according to the rigorous B3 Guidelines, including stormwater retention ponds that remove 80% of total suspended solids, 80% reduction in energy use, a bee lawn requiring limited mowing, wiring for future EV charging stations, and 40% increased vegetated area onsite from 0% preconstruction. All interior materials are low/no VOC, exceeding B3 guidelines. The building has specialized acoustic design, vastly improved air quality, 87% daylight autonomy (100% of regularly occupied spaces have outdoor views), new robotic operation broadcast production areas, community spaces, and wellness features.

2. URBN Corporate Campus

   Housed in Philadelphia’s historic Navy Yard, this multi-phased corporate campus provides new design studios and office space for the company’s distinctive retail brands, while celebrating the idiosyncratic remnants of 125 years of shipbuilding. Embracing both the history of the Navy Yard and URBN’s modern culture by layering old and new, the design team found inspiration in the factory characteristics of the buildings—industrial materiality, open volumes, and access to daylight—to repurpose the buildings’ major function from production to creativity. The synthesis of four measures—art, culture, economy, and environment—results in the transformation from a production-based yard to a creativity-based campus.

3. Songdo International City Library Design Competition

   MSR Design’s design competition submission for the Songdo International City Library proposes 21st-century library services in a series of 24/7 spaces connected to the public park system. The dramatic engagement of a spiraling park connects all four levels of service together through outdoor public programming that can operate day and night. A central community core and high performing building enclosure ensure daylight reaches all library spaces and promote connectivity between generations. The flexible library spaces between the community core and park areas are designed to accommodate active and passive activities, while allowing direct access to information.

4. Workshop

   Converting a 100-year-old foundry in the heart of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District into an innovative, multipurpose environment presented unique challenges. MSR worked closely with the start-up creative agency to help realize its future mission and purpose through the design process. The open, flexible layout accommodates everything from workplace and making/prototyping activities to exhibitions and weddings.

   Demolition and construction revealed treasures from past use, such as hidden fire doors, an underground tunnel, and pit. The design integrates these elements throughout as reminders of the building’s rich history. Massive, custom steel-and-glass entries open onto a steel deck, providing a porous connection to the street and neighborhood. The highly-flexible and ever-evolving space simultaneously accommodates the client’s original intent for the space (workplace) and new and unexpected uses (event space).

5. Haverford College Visual Culture, Arts & Media (VCAM) Building

   Haverford College’s new Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) building repurposes a gym built in 1900 into a vibrant 21st-century learning environment. The design preserves the old gym’s central, two-story vaulted space, while inserting a three-story, object study/media production classroom and creating a new living room for the campus. All primary program spaces open onto and animate the heart of the building—a three-story remnant of an indoor running track—that now functions as campus family room with kitchen, community table, display area, projection wall, and movable furniture. Classrooms, labs, offices, and presentation spaces encourage trans-disciplinary collaboration and experimentation in digital media, film, 3D fabrication, and material culture. The project is certified LEED-NC v. 3 Gold.

6. Louisville Free Public Library Northeast Regional Library

   Located adjacent to a historic house and landscape, Louisville Free Public Library’s third regional library brings service to an outlying region of the city. Conceived as a pavilion in a park, the building offers sweeping views of the park and historic site. It features a special technology-driven classroom, highly flexible reading room, makerspace with audiovisual lab and demonstration kitchen, and a college corner in the teens’ area. A column-free interior, multi-function access flooring, and rooms enclosed by movable furnishings support adaptability to meet perpetually evolving library demands and ambitions. Sustainable design strategies contributing to the building’s LEED-NC v.3 Gold certification include siting the building to take advantage of natural daylight and a geothermal mechanical system, among numerous others. Circulation for the first month of operation broke the library system’s previous record by 25%.

   MSR Design collaborated with architect JRA Architects and landscape architect MKSK.

7. Norman Public Library Central

   Together with the new Norman Public Library East Library, the new central library furthers the city’s “Norman Forward” citizen-initiated goals to fund and create quality of life projects for the community. It serves as a new town hall with shared community spaces, conference rooms, a technology lab, a genealogy research workspace, and a multipurpose room that can accommodate a range of events. The new library provides highly flexible spaces for collaborative learning, new education models, digital literacy, and information sharing, including a makerspace. Sky and plinth design elements represent the intersection of Oklahoma’s iron rich topography and open sky of the prairie. The courtyard features a specially commissioned sculpture entitled “Unbound” created by London artist Paul Cocksedge. Registered for LEED-NC v.3 Silver certification, the project features a range of passive design strategies, including a visible stormwater management system with interpretive signage to educate visitors about the process, optimized daylighting and shading, and orientation of the building on the site to mitigate solar gain.

    

8. Tulsa City-County Central Library

   The design team targeted three primary goals for the project: 1. Become a downtown destination that contributes to renewal of the urban core. 2. Create a library building that responds to 21st-century library needs. 3. Be generative, positively impacting library users, the surrounding community, the library industry, and the environment.

   To achieve these goals, the design team crafted a building program and architectural response that includes a revitalized, humanized civic plaza and new public garden for programming and community events; a clear, secure entry sequence in which all ways of entering the library collect into one main lobby area; a new parking garage; an interactive education center; a maker space; and a destination children’s library with direct access to the garden. Sustainable measures include improved thermal performance of the entire building envelope, daylight harvesting and lighting strategies, and the first rooftop photovoltaic solar array installed on a Tulsa building.

9. Mill City Museum

   Located within the ruined walls of the National Historic Landmark Washburn A Mill, the Mill City Museum focuses on the stories of flour milling, water power, railroading, food product development, grain trading, and farming, as well as the related people, labor, and immigrant stories. With multiple entries on two levels, the museum functions as a porous link between downtown Minneapolis and the river. A must-see addition to the riverfront’s menu of cultural attractions, the museum furthers the city’s vision of reconnecting to its birthplace at Saint Anthony Falls.

10. Orono Residence

    The design evolves from the agricultural legacy of the site’s fields and fence rows interacting with a new stone wall to establish precincts for new uses: windbreak, orchard, garden, lawn, and pool. Chosen to age gracefully, irregularly-cut courses of New York bluestone predominate the house inside and out. The stone contrasts with reclaimed materials, such as Douglas fir structural beams, teak flooring made of reused railroad ties from Africa, and antique ceramic tile and fireplace mantels. Gable rafters change slope along the length of the house, forming an S-shaped ridgeline that evokes an image of a sagging barn roof to represent the passage of time.