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Built into the hillside to preserve the cemetery’s pastoral quality, the Lakewood Garden Mausoleum’s elegantly simple design quietly embraces the landscape while offering a contemplative interior experience. This granite-clad, 24,000 square-foot, two-level mausoleum includes six crypt rooms, six columbaria rooms, three family crypt rooms, committal room, and support spaces. Light filters through exquisite patinaed bronze metal curtainwall, slim-slotted windows, and exterior ground-level walking surface skylights to offer a peaceful and serene experience to those who are grieving the loss of loved ones. Inside, light filters through skylights and lantern-windows to strengthen the relationship between the spiritual and the earth-bound. Clad in rough-textured gray granite and white mosaic-marble, the mausoleum unfolds horizontally on its site within three smaller pods that recall the many family mausoleums throughout the historic cemetery.

Lakewood Garden Mausoleum was designed by award-winning Design Principal Joan M. Soranno, FAIA with Project Architect John Cook, FAIA of HGA Architects and Engineers with General Contractor Mortenson Construction. Empirehouse joined HGA as a design-assist partner and was selected as the Architectural Glass & Metal Contractor for this one-of-a-kind project. The design-assist services Empirehouse contributed to the project helped bring the Architect’s unique design vision into reality, while keeping the project within budget.

Taking the Architect’s vision and the Owner’s requirements, Empirehouse brought together a team of premium manufacturers and laced them together with our architectural glass, metal and glazing expertise. Together we provided custom-designed bronze metal and glass products for doors, curtainwall, and window framing that are contemporary, transparent, and functional and compliment the existing structures.

The Lakewood Garden Mausoleum is not only unique, it is one of the finest constructed projects in the state of Minnesota. The attention to detail, the superior material quality of bronze and glass used for the skylights, windows, hand railings, and entrance doors, highlight old world craftsmanship.

Scope:

• Six Flat Skylights
• Custom fabricated Bronze Clad Windows
• Ten oversized bronze balance doors with decorative grills and art glass
• Glass guardrail
• Family Crypt gates

Empirehouse teamed with W. Gohman Construction and Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, Ltd. on the St. Cloud Library project. While the curtainwall specified utilizes a standardized framing system, the design called for unique flared radius walls, extended wings, multiple roof slopes, and oversized glass lites reaching 56” x 163” and weighing over 500 pounds each. This made both the metal fabrication and glazing installation complex and challenging.

Five different types of glass coatings and colors further complicated the work. Empirehouse developed a solid coordination and pre-planning strategy to ensure that glass was correctly ordered and installed in the right location.

Adding to the difficulty, all of the exterior glass curtainwall openings were “virtually” measured before physical openings were completed. When the structure was ready to accept our materials, all the frames fit perfectly.

Humidity control was an important factor for this library project. Empirehouse provided numerous ties to the air barrier system to create humidity balance. In addition, the glass wall system accommodated a 1-1/2” deflection in the head of the frame while maintaining air barrier flexibility.

The architect’s design intent became a perfect marriage of energy efficiency with transparency. The low-E fritted glass throughout allowed for a high degree of transparency looking out and into the library and provided internal spaces with generous daylighting.

Scope:

• Curtainwall
• Oversize glass lites
• The interior all-glass walls floor-to-ceiling glass room separators;
• all-glass stair railings
• all-glass elevator enclosures
• all-glass doors.

There are many unique glass features that make up the Westminster Presbyterian Church expansion project, such as a structurally glazed point-supported system with heavy tempered glass fins and glass units treated with a dichroic film application to simulate modern stained glass, a 30-foot wide by a seven-foot-high domed skylight, an over-sized sliding glass door systems, a folding glass wall system for sound control, and curtainwall with custom fly-by conditions. These specialized glass features involved a collaborative effort between many members from Empirehouse project management, fabrication, and field installation team who pooled their thoughts to develop a comprehensive installation plan and keep the project running on schedule. Empirehouse was able to use a variety of our team members to help to identify the client’s needs to ensure a timely release of material, so fabrication and installation could meet the demands of the schedule.

Scope:

• scope and constructability review
• aesthetic selection and product integration;
• structural engineering and detail development;
• Revit modeling design and VDC integration;
• computer-simulated thermal modeling;
• Total Glass Area: 11,000 square feet