Chanhassen Civic Campus

Civic Campus

HKGi assisted the City of Chanhassen in reimagining its civic campus as a city center that will attract visitors to the campus and the surrounding downtown area for community events and recreational and cultural activities. HKGi’s designers worked closely with City leaders and staff members to establish a set of guiding principles, explore a variety of potential design concepts, identify potential costs, challenges and opportunities, and identify a preferred concept.

HKGi conducted schematic design as well as design development, construction documentation, and project management for the project.

The new civic center retains the existing library, skate park, Veterans’ Memorial, and parking structure while adding a new city hall; new pickleball courts; a new park pavilion, stage, plaza, fire pit, and upper lawn; an art walk; a splash fountain; a new playground; food truck areas; reflection pool, and a reconfigured intersection.

Downtown Vision and Design Guidelines

HKGi worked with the City of Chanhassen to update its Downtown Vision Plan to better reflect market and development changes since the initial plan was completed in the early 2000s. The update process included a market scan, which provided the foundation for a potential build-out analysis and identified the development types with the greatest near- and long-term potential. In addition to conducting the market scan, HKGi’s planners identified the most promising implementation steps and projects to improve connectivity, enhance public spaces, improve land uses and urban design, and assess proposed developments downtown.

As part of the planning process, HKGi also created redevelopment vignettes for key redevelopment opportunity sites throughout the downtown area. These sites were identified as near-term or long-term, and the vignettes were intended to illustrate how different development concepts might fit within the larger downtown environment.

As part of HKGi’s planning work for the Civic Campus, the firm also developed a set of Design Guidelines for future development initiatives in the downtown area.