AIA Minneapolis has named six recipients of the 2026 Merit Awards, honoring projects by AIA Minneapolis architects that demonstrate design excellence, serve the public interest, and thoughtfully respond to the many forces that shape a building.
The McKnight Foundation is a non-profit headquarters designed by Dunham, along with our partners Studio BV, Greiner, and Reigstad. We are proud of our work and our partnerships that lead to the creation of this award-winning project.
The McKnight Foundation occupies a 45,000 SF facility that has achieved LEED ID&C Gold certification. The foundation challenged our design team to provide a solution to fully condition the space without using any fossil fuels on-site to meet their strategic goals. Additionally, site constraints would not allow for any geothermal exchange. Our design utilized a storage source heat pump system with thermal energy storage and a water-to-water chiller-heater providing heating water to the building sourced from the thermal energy storage loop. An ice thermal energy storage system serves as both a heat energy source and a cooling energy source to condition the building throughout the year. An air-to-water heat pump can operate in heating or cooling mode with a reversing refrigerant valve to provide heating and cooling to the thermal energy storage loop. The ice is melted for heating during the winter to retain storage capacity with the air source heat pump, which also provides summer cooling when heat is not needed. The ice storage system is available for more traditional off-peak ice storage during the cooling season. Heat recovery dedicated outside air units serves 4-pipe fan coil units in the space. The overall efficiency far exceeds that of electric resistance heating, and an electric boiler is available as a backup heating source. The result is no on-site greenhouse gas emissions with this all-electric design.
