BKV Group began in Minneapolis in 1978 as Boarman Architects, a sole proprietorship. It’s now a partnership with studios in Minneapolis, Chicago, Dallas and Washington, D.C., plus production offices in Vietnam. Housing is the firm’s staple: market-rate, affordable, senior and student. It also designs fire stations, police facilities and other government buildings, and it keeps engineers in-house. BKV was the architect on the Landmark Tower Office-to-Residential Conversion in Saint Paul, turning a 25-story office building into 187 apartments for Sherman Associates. The firm puts the building at 213,000 gross square feet and credits Frana Companies as general contractor. Building conversion is one of the practice areas BKV markets.
The sector list is the most telling thing on BKV Group’s site, and it is longer than the housing-plus-public-safety summary above suggests. Published practice areas run to market-rate and multifamily housing, student living, senior living, affordable housing, hospitality, corporate, mixed-use, conversions and repositioning, fire station and EMS, law enforcement, justice, detention, city halls, public works, education, libraries, and non-profit and mission-driven work.
Read that list as a pair of specialisms rather than a scattering. One half is residential at every price point and stage of life. The other half is municipal buildings – the police station, the fire hall, the courthouse, the city hall, the public works yard, the library. Those are the buildings a city council commissions, and they come with public meetings, referendum timelines and operational briefs that have little in common with a market-rate apartment pro forma. A firm that does both is unusual, and it is why BKV turns up on projects where a city is trying to put housing and a civic function on the same parcel.
Conversions and repositioning appear as their own named sector rather than as a line in a brochure, which is consistent with the Landmark Tower work described above being a practice area instead of an outlier.
The firm also describes pre-planning and development services ahead of design. In plain terms it can be hired before anyone has decided what to build – to test whether a site or an existing building supports the program – which is a different engagement from being handed a brief and asked to draw it.
Project geography spreads further than the studio list implies. Work shown on the firm’s own pages sits in Saint Paul, Chanhassen and Buffalo in Minnesota, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Bloomington in Indiana, Richmond and Alexandria in Virginia, and Andrews in Texas. That is a record of where it has built rather than a declared service area, but it suggests the practice travels for the right commission.
The office is in the Long and Kees Building at 222 North Second Street, Minneapolis, on 612-339-3752.
