A Design Partnership Success Story: Excellence at Eleven

When it comes to completing a complex project, success is the result of a shared effort. While the structure of a design team varies due to market knowledge to construction integration to the client’s designer preference, a consistent thread is woven throughout the process: collaboration. From serving as the design architect to architect of record, our design team has always focused on aligning with the client's vision and successfully executing every step of the way. Regardless of the need, our design and construction teams embrace various design partnerships, and Eleven is one example of consistent teamwork that leads to impactful results. 

Recently recognized with the 2023 Multihousing News Bronze Award for the Interior Design Category, the 2023 Multihousing News Bronze Award for the Best Development & Design High Rise and the 2023 DBIA Upper Midwest Project of the Year, Eleven is the result of a fully integrated design-build process where every team member played a crucial role in the project’s success, including achieving 75 percent presales by completion at a record $960-per-square-foot average.  

At Eleven, our in-house architecture and interior design teams partnered with design architect Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) to create a vision of luxury housing in downtown Minneapolis. This design partnership was the ideal arrangement for Eleven as it helped support the market need, offered a heightened focus on constructability and provided that the designers were hands-on during construction.  

A design partnership at Eleven led to success for the following reasons:  

Refining Aesthetics 

With a guiding vision of grandeur and elegance, RAMSA set the tone for positioning Eleven in the luxury housing market. Our architecture and interior design teams were then responsible for translating RAMSA’s vision into reality and aligning it to the intricacies of the Midwest market. To respond to the local market and design vernacular, our design team partnered with additional local residential interior designers and listing agents to refine the design concept and ensure that the luxury vision also reflected the unique lifestyle preferences of the surrounding community. 

Heightened Focus on Constructability  

Eleven is a highly complex and technical project. The 41-story building (tallest residential project in the Upper Midwest) had challenging site setbacks, height restrictions, high wind loads, condo unit minimums and parking ratio requirements, our design team took RAMSA’s grand vision and aligned the puzzle pieces into a buildable reality. The partnership between the two teams enabled RAMSA to focus almost entirely on the experiential quality of the design while our Ryan A+E team focused on the efficiency and practicality of how those decisions could be implemented. In practice, our design team modeled the 2,640 panels of the architectural pre-cast concrete of the façade in the 3D model to coordinate directly with fabricators for a smooth design-to-fabrication-to-installation process. 

 A Hands-On Construction Process 

With RAMSA located in New York and our design team located just steps away from the project site, hands-on collaboration between the design and construction teams was critical during this complex project's 30-month construction administration phase. As a result, key members of our in-house design team co-located to the job site office with our construction staff. This close integration minimized formal RFIs and allowed the project team to collaboratively solve problems, while also keeping RAMSA involved and informed in real-time along the way. This deliberate collaboration improved quality and significantly reduced rework, particularly during the procurement challenges of a global pandemic. 

We are always welcome to cultivating the right partnerships in consultation with our clients. With demonstrated success with nearly every type of design partnership, our goal is our client’s goals. If you are interested in collaborating with Ryan A+E, reach out to Mike Rodriguez below to learn more.