Lake Elmo City Center
Lake Elmo, Minn. By Deborah R. Huso
Several years ago, the City of Lake Elmo, Minn., had two conundrums. The lakeside community east of the Twin Cities was planning to shift from volunteers to a full-time/duty crew staffing model for its fire department, but their two existing fire stations couldn’t accommodate the number of new personnel. Secondly, the city government had outgrown its city hall, which was more than 40 years old.
The city purchased an existing speculative office building in a more centralized location with the hope of moving city hall operations there, but the structure was in dire need of a facelift. “We looked at the possibilities for reusing the 1980s office building to save money,” explains Todd LaVold, associate and senior project manager for Minneapolis-based architectural firm LEO A DALY. The idea of combining the city hall and fire station quickly emerged.
According to LEO A DALY director of design Daniel Yudchitz, the firm helped the city establish a plan for renovating the existing office building and adding two new wings to accommodate a council chamber, public lobby, community room, and a fire station with apparatus bays. Precast concrete, with panels simultaneously serving both structural and architectural purposes, offered the opportunity to create the new city center economically.
Designing for a Cohesive Structure
“The existing [office] building was nondescript and had no hierarchy,” Yudchitz explains. So the architectural team wanted to create a facility with civic presence, marked by a mini civic plaza at the complex’s entrance. Using wood as a material to signify the entry along with solar shading, the new city center’s main entrance (situated in one of the two new wings of the building) opens into double-height community space.
The City of Lake Elmo’s design team established a plan for renovating the existing office building and adding two new wings to accommodate a council chamber, public lobby, and a fire station with apparatus bays. Photo: Thomas Grady.
LaVold says the goal of the precast concrete panels used to construct the city center’s two new additions was to achieve a woodlike texture, similar to board and batten, to provide an agrarian feel that is reflective of the surrounding community. The exterior façade is meant to emulate shou sugi ban—a Japanese process of charring wood for a unique aesthetic. Albany, Minn.–based precast concrete manufacturer Wells used a custom formliner and worked tirelessly to perfect a charcoal-colored concrete with an acid finish to support the design team’s desired aesthetic.
“The texture was designed to elevate the material and give it some shadow play and reflect the verticality of [window] openings on the existing office building,” Yudchitz adds.
Wells developed three different types of precast concrete panels for the project. The formwork provides the board and batten style texture, while the concrete “featured a sparkle in the mix design to provide more life to the façade,” LaVold explains.
While designers and builders often think using a precast concrete system limits the design flexibility of a project by having to use repetition to make it affordable, Lake Elmo City Center is an example of how unique architectural features can be incorporated into the precast concrete panel design without sacrificing structural integrity. “There wasn’t a lot of repetition in this project,” LaVold says. “Of the 97 architectural wall panels, about 75 are unique.”
The biggest precast concrete components of the project were 83-ft-long double tees. The largest wall panels were 38 ft tall and 12 in. thick, though the panels for the storm shelter section of the building were 14 in. thick.
Building for Strength and Durability
Almost all of the precast concrete components in the project serve both structural and architectural purposes simultaneously. The project team used precast concrete double tees for the roof of the fire station to accommodate large, open spans in the bay. The only precast concrete structural columns needed for the design framed the garage doors, supporting the architectural element of large wooden panel returns over the doors.
“There were architectural elements around the overhead doors of the fire station where we added columns behind the walls to provide bearing capacity for the roof double tees,” notes Jace Rossow, regional façades manager for Wells. Precast concrete provided all structural support for the city center wings, save for the support of the main entrance’s upper-level cantilever, which required steel beams for bearing.
The team also had to design and build a council chamber that would serve a secondary purpose as a storm shelter compliant with the International Code Council’s ICC 500, ICC/NSSA Standard for the Design and Construction of Storm Shelters. “A lot of engineering went into the foundations to hold the precast in place during a weather event, and we included jamb reinforcements on the windows,” LaVold says.
“It was a unique shape,” Rossow adds. “What caused the biggest challenge was having a taller structure right next to it.” According to Rossow, in a weather event, that taller structure could fall against the council chamber/storm shelter. “So we had to beef up the design of those walls and design a structural connection to the roof of the adjacent building, so it would break away in the event of a weather incident.”
Precast concrete for construction of the two new city center wings was completed in just four weeks.
Rossow says precast concrete enabled the client and architect to affordably achieve their desired aesthetic for the city center. “Precast concrete structures are highly durable, energy-efficient, resist mold growth, reduce the spread of fire, dampen sound transmission, and have lower life-cycle maintenance costs. These can be important components to consider when creating a building that will be multipurpose, open to the public, and include potentially high-moisture areas, such as the apparatus bay.”
Precast Concrete Supports Adaptive Reuse
The key challenge of the project was ensuring the existing office structure could coexist with the two new wings. To unite the old building with its new additions from a design standpoint, the project team removed the structure’s old windows and added top-to-bottom windows in a curtain wall fashion and recoated the building’s exterior stucco finish.
Yudchitz says the establishment of the Lake Elmo City Center reflects a larger challenge architects must increasingly address: the adaptive reuse of obsolete office space. “This is really the time when communities and businesses have to look at how to transform these buildings for new uses. How do we reuse all this office stock?” he asks. “That’s where the value of design is super important.”
Project Stats:
Size: 37,520 sq ft
Cost: $13.6 million
Owner: City of Lake Elmo, Minn.
Architect: LEO A DALY, Minneapolis, Minn.
Contractor: H+U Construction, Minneapolis, Minn.
Structural Engineer: Meyer | Borgman | Johnson, Duluth, Minn.
This article was originally published in PCI Ascent Fall 2024.
