Mill City Museum

Located on the historic Mississippi Riverfront, the Mill City Museum is built with the ruin walls of the National Historic Landmark Washburn A Mill which had succumbed to a fire during the early 1990s. Many features of the historically significant original mill were left intact, including turbine pits, railroad tracks, a train shed and two engine houses. The new museum features historical exhibits about Minneapolis, flour milling machinery, and includes interactive laboratories focused on water and baking. The centerpiece of the exhibit, a multistory flour tower, where visitors sit in the cab of a freight elevator and are taken to different floors of the building, each designed to look like a floor in a working flour mill.

“A creative adaptive reuse of an extant shell of a mill building, with contrasting insertion of contemporary materials, weaving the old and the new into a seamless whole. . . . It is museum as a verb.”
AIA National Honor Awards Jury