Design: HCMC's Whittier Clinic Holds Its Own on Eat Street

Nicollet Avenue welcomes an architecturally adventurous family care clinic.

The Whittier Clinic recently opened at Nicollet Avenue and 28th Street.

Image credit: HCMC

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Eat Street, the stretch of Nicollet Avenue cutting a culinary swath from downtown Minneapolis to Lake Street, is best known for the unabashedly authentic menu offerings turned out by its dozens of culturally diverse kitchens. Whether you’re looking for pig feet pho, dolphin milk candy or kidney bits served with spaetzel, the boulevard is ripe with non-chicken-nugget options.

So when planners from Hennepin County Medical Center decided to move their Lake Street family care clinic into a stand-alone building at the southern end of Nicollet at 28th, they knew that fitting into the neighborhood would require unconventional thinking. Just as the Wednesday lunch specials from Franklin Ave. to the Midtown Greenway represent an eccentric kaleidoscope, the area’s architecture is stunningly varied. 19th-century brick commercial shops and suburban-style strip malls sit cheek by jowl, while canopies and neon signage belt out multi-lingual come-ons.

Nobody was likely to miss the sad collection of boxes HCMC cleared away to make room for the new clinic. Meat-packing and trucking warehouses had been abandoned years earlier on the site and left to rot behind a wrinkled chain link fence. The local neighborhood organization, Whittier Alliance, subsequently committed to seeing the site redeveloped and became a strong voice throughout the design process.

Minneapolis architects HGA deliver the Whittier Clinic as an urbane and playful collage of brick, metal panels, staggered window patterns and an abundance of canopies. Squarely grounded at the Nicollet intersection, the building entrance spills out onto the sidewalk in a series of steps, gently graded ramps and planters.

Beyond the entry, the building spreads out into two wings—administration to the south, exam room and labs to the west—in an L-shaped plan. In contrast to the warehouse monolith that preceded it, the new clinic’s street-side exterior is highly varied and articulated. Plain, reddish brown brick juices up the contrast between metallic window bays and the gleaming rectangular volume at the corner. Hovering above the corner entry plaza, a wall of shiny aluminum bands is peppered with small windows.

According to project design architect, Amy Douma, members of the resident design review group hoped the final project could be interesting enough to earn attention from diners at a window seat in any of the nearby restaurants. “The neighborhood wanted a dynamic façade,” she recalls. So in addition to trellises and reflective materials, they installed programmable LED fixtures in the small windows that can provide a nighttime light show.

During the day, each window reveals glass tinted to match one of the four colors the hospital system has adopted as part of its institutional branding. Coordinated to match the “Four hands” logo HCMC uses on its signs and ambulances, blue, orange, green and purple accents are found throughout the building’s interior. Infused with large graphics and translucent screen walls, the colors help the clinic’s diverse body of patients find their way around, many who speak little or no English.

While the clinic occupies only about a quarter of the site, the rest of the block has been developed largely into pedestrian amenities such as bus shelters, benches and a large rain garden on south edge near the Midtown Greenway, as well as surface parking in the middle of the block. The neighborhood and the City Planning Commission, however, have larger goals for the open portions of the block, which fall within the formally designated “pedestrian overlay district.”

Space remains for additional commercial and residential development on the site, paired with a projected parking ramp. If the city’s plan to relocate the Lake Street Kmart and re-open Nicollet Avenue all the way to Lake Street becomes a reality, development pressure will only spike at this previously forgotten urban backwater. Add a planned east-west trolley in the midtown greenway, and this site could quickly become a dynamic crossroads for both the Whittier neighborhood and south Minneapolis.

In the meanwhile, no worries: The new Whittier Clinic is architecturally energizing enough to spice up this little corner of Eat Street on its own.