New National Headquarters / Ottawa Street Power Station Redevelopment

Located on a seven-acre riverfront campus, this once-empty shell of a building, accompanied by a modern, four-story addition, is now transformed into an award-winning, state-of-the-art, nine story office complex providing over 300,000 SF of office space for current and future employees.

The power plant, which was decommissioned in 1992, was retrofitted with a chilled water plant and high-pressure steam distribution facility in 2001 to provide cooling for downtown businesses but had otherwise stood in obsolescence since that time. Constructed in 1939, it is considered to be one of the finest examples of classic Art Deco architecture, with many distinctive features incorporated by Bowd-Munson, renowned architects of the period. These features include a stepped roofline, building and windows shaped to represent a stylized plume of fire, and exterior building colors symbolizing the combustion of coal, starting with black granite at the base, giving way to purple grey in the lower masonry, and continuing to red and yellow bricks that lighten in hue as the “flame” rises.