Welcome to the neighborhood
KENT DARR Nov 9, 2018 | 9:41 pm
2 min read time
570 wordsAll Latest News, Real Estate and Development
In case you have missed it, a glass cube has emerged from a bare patch of ground in the Western Gateway. It glows in the dark and it offers see-through views of a company at work.It is a marvel of office design. The building is all glass, held up by steel columns that have holes cut in them to offer a passageway for ductwork, conduit, a sprinkler system.
If you stand in the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park and look north at the building, the Krause Gateway Center, you might rub your chin and say, “That building looks like it’s floating.”
The illusion is by design.
If you’re interested in detail, those beams are supporting a 4,000-ton structure. The weight breaks down to about 50 pounds per square foot; the typical commercial structure is about 10 pounds per square foot.
Some heavy lifting is required to create an image of light.
It is a building conceived as a way to promote interaction or collisions — between Kum & Go and its new neighborhood, and among Kum & Go workers.
The Krause Gateway Center accommodates about 300 employees, though only 50 percent of them might be in the office on any given day. The $160 million structure was built for expansion. Other than a smallish room built in an interior stairwell, the third floor is empty space.
Inside, you’ll get a sampling of the Krause family art collection, and other glimpses of Kum & Go’s history.
Almost everything is on display at the Krause Gateway Center. Conference rooms are behind glass. Today, you could watch folks sharing a joke, at least a good laugh, in one. Three meeting rooms were occupied on the first floor, which also features a lobby and welcome center.
In a conference room named after Kum & Go co-founder Tony Gentle, an imprint of a bow tie occupies a good portion of a white wall. In 1959, Tony Gentle and son-in-law William Krause opened a gasoline station; the little operation became Kum & Go, the convenience store operator that also owns a trucking company, a soccer team, a winery and hotel in Italy, AND a real estate development company.
So if you’re looking for impressions in a glass-walled corporate headquarters, the impression you might find is that this is a company driven by an overwhelming entrepreneurial spirit.
Chairman and CEO Kyle Krause made the decision a few years ago that he was going to bring the company founded by his grandfather and father to downtown Des Moines, reversing a trend that had seen many companies bolt for the suburbs. Kum & Go moved to town Nov. 5 from West Des Moines.
Krause decided to share his piece of the Western Gateway landscape with the public. A courtyard has a bocce ball court that is open to the public; a pathway was created from Sherman Hill to the north to the sculpture park. Remember, much of Krause’s concept was to promote collisions; they can be the source of a friendly “hello” or a big idea.
“We believe strongly that when you have density and diversity, great things can occur; the unplanned can occur,” said Tanner Krause, the 31-year-old president of Kum & Go. “Our real estate holdings, our real estate development is focused on creating collisions in which the spontaneous and the unexpected can occur.”
The public will be invited for a collision on Dec. 1.
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