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Power plants are not the first thing you think of when told to imagine a welcoming, inviting building. And when I say “power plant,” you might picture a hot, dirty space full of coal with thick, acrid smoke pouring from blackened smokestacks above. In the 19th century, black smoke signaled prosperous industry, but by the middle of the 20th century, the burgeoning environmental movement had made power plants public enemy number one.

This of course led to the abandonment of coal-fired plants all over America. At one point, downtown St. Louis even had its own small power plant operating just a block east of City Hall as part of the Municipal Services Building, providing steam to a handful of buildings. When the power plant closed, it immediately became a liability: a huge open space filled with giant boilers, towering smokestacks, and no real purpose. It could not function for its intended use again, so what could its future be?

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“The Power House spoke to us for its civic value and its potential,” says architect Tom Bergmann, executive director of practice integration at CannonDesign, which took over the space a decade ago. “We saw a building that had mattered deeply to our city and could matter again in entirely different ways. We were inspired by the building, and we sought to create a design solution that would inspire others.”

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The reason this power plant–turned–design office works so well is that it focuses, first and foremost, on how humans interact with the structure of the building. It amazes me how many historic and modern structures function poorly, including those that have won numerous design accolades. Dorms at Berkeley: An Environmental Analysis was published in 1967 with students’ scathing reviews of residence halls, puncturing what I feel was a mid-century neglect of the human in architectural design. In its place came a renewed interest in buildings reacting to their inhabitants and users.

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I see that renewed interest in the design done by the firm’s executive director of design, David Polzin, for The Center for Advanced Medicine at Barnes Jewish Hospital. The soaring atrium features two windows that stretch the height of the building, allowing for expansive views of Forest Park to the west and downtown St. Louis to the east. Going to the doctor is never fun, but when you’re walking along the balconies at CAM, with piano music echoing up the atrium, there is at least some peace at hand.

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Likewise, the CannonDesign renovation of the St. Louis Public Library’s Central Library and creative atrium brought the old library back to life while opening up the back of the building, the north side that faces the revitalized Washington Avenue. Light streams through the long windows of the old library stacks, and the addition complements, without competing, the Beaux Arts architecture of the original.

The same sensitivity to sunlight and its positive effects on humans at work shows up in the offices CannonDesign carved from the old power plant. Though the requirements of office space required the installation of two floors above the ground floor, access to natural light is never far from view. On the top floor, above the huge Roman-arched windows, light floods down from the clerestory roof, which still features the massive reinforced structures that once held up the smokestacks. On the lower floors, the cityscape shows through the huge windows along the northeast sides of the building; on the southwest side, the building is still attached to city-owned structures. Each floor’s profile is articulated differently, keeping visual interest from the exterior of the office floors.

Courtesy of CannonDesign David Polzin of CannonDesign

“Workplace culture has evolved over the last ten years,” says Polzin. “We are architects and engineers here, and we’ve always had a collaborative model. In [Cannon’s] Chicago office, they managed to fit everyone onto a single floor—something like 50,000 square feet. At this knuckle where the two towers come together, there’s this café, and the sort of casual intersections that happen when you’re all on one floor, they all happen more frequently and more naturally.” In the St. Louis office, “you end up with microcultures on each floor,” he continues. “People have to make the effort to go to other floors to visit people. And people do, and the building works.”

Polzin also touched on the role office management played in the use of space. No matter how beautiful or innovative a building’s design, it cannot instill morale on its own; that comes from effectively managing people and teams, empowering them, and nurturing the company culture.”

“One thing we do here is, we move people around,” Polzin explains, “We have a small set of private offices on the west wall with four of five senior people. But as people have retired, we haven’t really filled those offices—they’ve become collaboration spaces. I probably would have done away with private offices [in the original design].”

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I also appreciate the way CannonDesign has proven that creative, human-centered architecture can exist in the shadow of the Thomas Eagleton Courthouse. The blocks south of the Gateway Mall and north of the elevated lanes of Highway 40/Interstate 64 are some of the most challenging blocks in all of downtown. The indomitable hand of the federal marshalls dictates what happens around the federal courthouse, and the sweeping interstate onramps slash and interfere with more buildable blocks. The stately Cupples Warehouses have brought some life to the area, but for this area to truly thrive, there must be new construction, which has so far eluded developers. This should be valuable real estate. I hope when redevelopment does occur, it’s inspired by the human-centered solution CannonDesign brought to its new home.

Another positive outcome I hope will come out of the office’s remarkable design centers on the existence of similar structures awaiting their turns at reuse. On the west side of downtown, the old United Railways Power Station on Locust Street, with those tall windows on its front façade and clerestory skylights running the length of the building, sits vacant, awaiting a creative reuse. Likewise, the Laclede Power Station on the Near North Riverfront, owned by Great Rivers Greenway, could use the vision of a generous donor to bring that giant but endlessly dynamic space back to life.