In its former incarnation, KNOCK’s headquarters, located in a downtrodden precinct of Minneapolis, was a building remarkable only for being unremarkable. Millions of its cousins — aging, uninspired commercial boxes — dot the country’s secondary roads from coast to coast. Down-on-their-luck structures, they mostly go unnoticed and there is no love lost when they are felled. Thanks to the vision of KNOCK’s team and Minneapolis-based Julie Snow Architects, however, this little building, known as the Glen, is getting a second go at life.
Founded 10 years ago by entrepreneur Lili Hall, KNOCK is a branding, advertising, and design firm based on a collaborative business model. In 2008, as KNOCK threatened to outgrow its rented offices in Minneapolis’s warehouse district, Hall contacted Julie Snow (one of her employees is married to Snow’s partner, Matthew Kreilich), to renovate and expand their space. The architects went as far as producing a bid set of documents, but then Hall had second thoughts. Weighing the cost and the fact that the building was up for redevelopment, she decided to investigate buying something of her own. Her search brought her to Minneapolis’s bleak Harrison neighborhood, typified by its low commercial construction and modest single-family houses. Across from a supermarket-turned-funeral-parlor and next to an abandoned gas station, a dowdy 1960s former food distribution center caught her eye. The price was right and the site was convenient to Hall’s home and KNOCK’s largest client, Target, but the building had “teardown” written all over it. As the economy soured, however, Hall, acknowledging the challenge of securing loans to build from the ground up, instead asked Snow’s office to help reinvent the existing building.
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