Hines T3 Office

Project Details

Project Description

Real estate leader Hines has recognized that the wants and needs of contemporary, technology-rich workers are shifting the way we think about workplace design. The firm connected with DLR Group’s designers to explore these shifts, and conceptualize a project responding to growing cultural demand for local authenticity, sustainability, and urban and social connectivity. The result is the T3 concept: timber, transit, and technology. T3’s use of wood columns, beams, and floor joists makes it unique, the first major multi-story U.S. office building to be built of wood in the last 100 years. The design relies on exposed engineered wood components that convey organic warmth and beauty within the workplace environment, while being sustainable, renewable, and structurally predictable. Additional steel, masonry and accent materials complement the wood to create an authentically tactile work environment evoking classic urban lofts, while modern building systems and technology infrastructures support the current and projected needs of hi-tech workforce members. The building form and façade further complement T3’s neighboring buildings in Minneapolis’s North Loop warehouse district, bridging the historic warehouse sensibilities and the modernity of much newer nearby structures such as Target Field. Located adjacent to Cedar Lake Bike Trail, commuter rail, light rail, and a pedestrian skyway system, the T3 building is highly accessible to workforce members.


The T3 project comprises a seven-story, 238,000 SF wood-structure office building in downtown Minneapolis. The program includes open footprints on each floor for workspace tenants; a bike repair and storage facility; a fitness center for tenants; a roof-top amenity deck; and ground-floor retail. While alluding to historic buildings of the district, the T3 project will provide modern, clean, energy-efficient systems and technologies aimed at reducing the lifecycle carbon footprint of the project within its community. An energy-efficient building envelope design minimizes thermal bridging, and uses high performance glass. High-efficiency HVAC systems will maintain occupant comfort and health, with reduced energy inputs. The timber structure affords distinct sustainability advantages. Data from past mid-rise office projects has shown a significant reduction in life cycle impact for a timber structure, as compared to a concrete or steel structure. The timber structure is less energy-intensive to extract, and is renewable with minimal inputs. It requires relatively little energy input to process raw logs into engineered wood products for building (whereas concrete and steel require significant material and energy inputs). And finally, the carbon that is absorbed by trees through the process of photosynthesis is actually sequestered in the wood fiber throughout its lifetime in the building. The project will effectively be a carbon-sink for its lifetime, and for as long as the wood products can be recycled and reused. DLR Group worked as architect of record in collaboration with Michael Green Architecture.