Hiawatha Collegiate High School

U+B recently finished the design and construction for a new high school facility, connected to the historically significant Canada Dry bottling plant in Minneapolis. This project allowed Hiawatha Academies to fully realize their goal of achieving a cohesive K-12 education program geared toward low income families in Minneapolis.

Working closely with the City of Minneapolis for the adaptive re-use of the long neglected bottling plant, U+B designed for a re-birth of the site that embraces and rehabilitates the original art-deco building shell and cleans up the site previously used as a dumpster staging area and junk yard. The renovation provides an addition appropriate for high school level academics for a program closing the achievement gap better than any other in Minneapolis. 100% of graduating seniors from the Hiawatha Academies program were accepted to college the first year the new high school opened- a performance level three-times that of student’s grade-level peers in the area district, and a trend that is expected to continue among Hiawatha scholars for years to come.

Historic Photograph Sources: Mary Reardon