The American company 3M is known to the general public primarily as the inventor of adhesive tape and self-adhesive Post-It. However, the company, which has existed for more than 100 years, produces materials and products for the mining, telecommunications and many other industries, and the main value for it is constant inventive activity, which gives an advantage over competitors. However, its headquarters in St. Paul, near Minneapolis, did not seem to be a stronghold of innovation until recently: the main, 15-story building was built in the early 1960s, and the low buildings surrounding the parking lot in front of it - in the early 1970s, and therefore, by the beginning of the 2010s, the whole complex was outdated both physically and morally. In addition, the team was dominated by employees of pre-retirement and retirement age, and the company's management needed to attract young people - including through an attractive work environment.
However, the directors of the company decided not to build a new one, but to reconstruct the existing buildings. Peter Ebner and Friends and Atelier Hitoshi Abe were tasked with this task. During the first phase of the project, Ebner's workshop took over the lower two floors of the main building and the park behind it. Now the main entrance faces not the parking lot (now turned into a courtyard with black and white pavement and greenery according to the project of Hitoshi Abe), but a landscape park created on the site of boring lawns and a reservoir. The old complex embodied the principles of the international style, more specifically - of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but its architect still did not fully understand Mies's ideas, according to Peter Ebner, who tried to implement them in his project.
All non-bearing partitions of the lower tiers were dismantled and replaced with glass walls. They separate the actual lobby from a series of meeting rooms and areas for communication and exchange of ideas, as well as a conference room. In one of the large meeting rooms, there is a long table with a table top made of a solid travertine slab, which was brought to the USA from Italy at one time: it, like the travertine floors, is part of the old decoration of the building.
On the 2nd floor, from the courtyard-plaza side, there is another unusual table - a 42-meter high-grade steel table with a touch-screen tabletop. 3M employees can connect to the company's database using their electronic IDs and get any information they need there. At the same time, the table serves as a place for informal communication and exchange of ideas - quite in the spirit of the basic principles of the project - community, communication and collaboration (community, communication, collaboration).
The Exchange space, located in a new cubic annex next to the courtyard façade of the main building, serves the same purpose. There, a media wall of 8.5 mx 6.4 m, created by 3M specialists, consisting of 14 interactive screens, was installed. This room is intended for active discussion of new ideas and projects, including in the video conference mode.
In parallel, the architects from Atelier Hitoshi Abe were engaged in low buildings around the perimeter of the complex - recreational areas, an educational center, a cafe - and created there so-called hubs with comfortable chairs and tables, touchscreens and monitors.
The next stages of reconstruction include the construction of a "box" on the roof of the main building, renovation of the upper (directorate) and all other floors, as well as its facades.
