Designed by Pritzker-prize winning architects Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW), the Krause Gateway Center is the new corporate headquarters of the Krause Group, a family of businesses best known for the Kum & Go convenience store chain. The Group seeks to balance the needs of ‘People, Planet and Profit,’ a philosophy that has led to LEED-certification for 100 Kum & Go stores.  

Arup worked closely with the architect and design team to develop a daylighting scheme for the building and acoustics and lighting strategies for its flexible, collaborative workspaces that maximized comfort and resource efficiency and helped the client qualify for LEED certification. The end result is a strikingly modern, sustainable building with a transparent structure that offers clear views of Western Gateway Park and the Pappajohn Sculpture Park.  

For this project, the client aimed to use the power of good design to promote a more open and collaborative corporate culture, and to bring value to the community by creating a building that was a worthy addition to Des Moines’ architectural legacy. The design team embraced a philosophy of “total experiential design,” and developed an array of architectural and design strategies that work to subtly shape the experience of visitors and staff, all within a sustainable framework.  

Acoustic consulting  

Providing sufficient speech privacy is more challenging in an open layout office than in a traditional office. This was particularly true for the Krause Gateway building, where an open layout and increased ceiling height changed in the aural environment. To avoid detracting from the open layout design while still providing the requisite level of speech privacy, Arup’s acoustics team proposed a layered strategy with sound masking as the base – a system that uses loudspeakers placed discreetly throughout the open office space to reduce distraction and provide an increased level of speech privacy.  

Arup SoundLab was used to illustrate the possibilities of sound masking in a robust acoustic model of the room with commissioned recordings to simulate a typical workplace dialogue and activity noise which allowed Arup to demonstrate sound masking’s ability to effectively improve speech privacy in the open plan office.  

Krause Gateway Exterior
The Krause Gateway Center design team embraced a philosophy of “total experiential design,” and developed an array of architectural and design strategies that work to subtly shape the experience of visitors and staff.
Architectural model of the Krause Gateway Centre
Architectural model of the building

Lighting design

A resilient building is inherently a sustainable building and the client wanted the Krause Gateway Center built to last at least 100 years. This meant that building systems needed to be flexible enough to adapt to changing business needs over time. 

Arup’s lighting strategy for the headquarters anticipates rapid changes in lighting protocols over the next two decades. The team went back to first principles to design a flexible digital infrastructure system that can be easily upgraded as lighting digitization advances. This future-proofed system features a fully digital control signal that allows lighting components to “speak” to one another. It also collects data that can be used to make the building smarter.