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Located in Minneapolis’s former warehouse district, the West Hotel adaptively re-uses a pair of historic buildings integrated with a new addition to create a 130,000-square-foot mixed-use project with 123 guestrooms above a retail plinth. The design approach involved a balancing act between meeting historic preservation guidelines and integrating complex program and construction conditions. Several sustainable strategies were implemented, including tying into an efficient district energy supply to minimize on-site energy consumption, as well as adding vegetated roofs to increase biodiversity and enrich guestroom views.
The exterior design pays homage to local brick traditions employing deep shaped piers and soldier-coursed spandrels in a masonry composition derived from careful analysis of adjacent historic properties. The primary facade features a framework of piers with slanted sections to reduce solar gain and provide guestroom privacy. East- and west-facing elevations flatten out to form an H-shaped plan with guestrooms and terraces for a bar and penthouse on the upper floor. At the site corner, the new six-story building steps down a level to meet the historic Commutator Foundry building, a contributing property constructed between 1884-1886 that housed lumbermen and railway jobbers as well as a foundry shed. Located along Second Avenue, The West’s main entrance and lobby transforms this shed structure into what the client envisions as a “new epicenter of the neighborhood,” as the three-story Commutator hosts a basement bar beneath a street-level restaurant with guestrooms above.
The building’s interiors are a collaboration with neri&hu from Shanghai, whose interiors create a dialogue between found places and guest experiences that recast the present through the past, complimenting the exterior’s blurring of old and new.
