High Standards Within Any Budget

Julie Snow Architects, Inc. is an architectural studio practice in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The studio focuses on projects that demand a creative, rigorous and thoughtful design process. Projects vary in type, complexity and scale, yet all have a common desire for architecture that is inventive, challenges programmatic type, creates a dialogue with its surroundings, and investigates architecture’s ability to transform experience.

Working with visionary clients and interdisciplinary teams, Julie Snow Architects produces work that ranges in scale and type from tables to bridges, a dog collar to corporate campuses, museums to multifamily housing. Projects have included institutional, industrial, infrastructural, corporate and residential work. Intentionally avoiding the expert status of a single building type, our studio promotes a design dialogue that, through research, challenges conventional design and constructional practices.

The studio’s first projects for Phillips Plastics and Quadion Corporation explored the utilitarian program in factories and mission-driven industrial projects. The manufacturing facilities received recognition for their simplicity, directness and the ability to enhance the user’s daily experience. The practice expanded with public sector and infrastructural work that combined the pragmatism of the industrial projects with the aspiration of enhancing civic daily life. Institutional projects followed, such as the Minnesota Transportation Museum, several small projects with the Walker Art Center, a new entry and student commons to a private preparatory school and, most recently, The Museum of Russian Art. Larger commissions have included a 90,000sf building for Microsoft software developers and a new nine-story condominium project in Minneapolis’s historic Mill District. In addition we have collaborated on a project for Medtronic, the industry leader in medical devices. Among these larger projects, we have undertaken a series of smaller experimental projects, competitions and studies. This project mix fosters the studio’s unique perspective on the rigors of the functional program, demanding budgets and schedules, while exploring architecture’s ability to transform the experience of place and activity.

The work of the firm attracts new clients intent on architecture that combines vision with a pragmatic dedication to programmatic innovation, constructional resolution, and a profound dialogue with their site. Clients select us for our ability to produce work that is restrained, elegant, warm and compelling. We are asked to reinvent how architecture performs in the world specific to our clients’ program and site, using innovative constructional technology to advance this performance. These high design standards are achieved within our client’s cost and schedule parameters. As a result, we are often asked to design additional projects with the same client.