Great Minds

Adaptive Reuse - Office - 19,000 SF - Richmond, VA

Housed in a former spice factory, this office is the headquarters of an innovative curriculum company named Great Minds. We translated the values they instill in their work to this space, emphasizing creativity, curiosity, and rigor. This is a DHR project, so our intervention is a sculpted mass held separate from the brick warehouse, behind the grid of existing wood columns surrounded by an open perimeter of arched windows. We hid nothing about the shell, leaving the years of accumulated paint and wear on the walls, floors, and columns. The dichotomy between the new, crisp, construction and the patina of the existing building highlights the strengths of both. The taut white box in the center of the space holds the offices, meeting rooms, kitchen, and bathrooms. We carved through the mass at the ground level, leaving two mezzanines separated by a central atrium. The sweeping curves and canted walls surround an atrium designed as an abstraction of a slot canyon, a nod to the home of the star of the space, a full sized replica of a T Rex skeleton.