The Krause Gateway Center in Des Moines, Iowa, the only building in the state designed by the firm of esteemed Italian architect Renzo Piano, may not have happened but for a chance encounter on a plane.

On a business trip several years ago to Italy to visit one of Krause Group’s soccer teams, Krause Group CEO Kyle Krause met a partner in the architecture firm of Renzo Piano Building Workshop. An in-person meeting between Krause and Piano, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect who designed the famous Shard tower in London, soon followed in Genoa and a personal connection was born that led to the architect designing Krause Group's headquarters.

Krause told CoStar News he and Piano connected over their shared love of sailing and dogs. After presenting ideas for what he wanted in the company’s headquarters, Piano casually agreed to take on the project. Krause said he was taken aback.

Krause thinks he was able to persuade Piano fairly easily into taking the Krause Gateway Center job because major architects rarely get a chance to work directly with a building’s owner.

“He’s designed museums where there are countless egos involved,” Krause said. “We had prepared a formal request for proposals to architects and were ready to send those.”

The company went ahead with the request for proposals anyway, though Krause said he was quietly rooting for Piano to win the gig. After receiving submissions from several other Pritzker Prize-winning architects, Piano was awarded the project.

The final $151 million product, Krause Gateway Center, serves as a focal point for a once-neglected part of downtown Des Moines and provides visual evidence of the Krause family’s desire to be a force for civic good in their hometown.

The building is used as a functional office for the growing convenience store chain Kum & Go, one of many companies owned by Krause Group. But it also was designed to appear open to the community and welcoming to visitors.

“This is not an office with barriers and gates and thick walls that make it appear closed to the public,” Krause told CoStar News during a recent building tour.

Krause said he and Piano agreed on the principle that the building should appear open to the community and a sign of Krause Group's role in civic life.

Native prairie grasses and trees are planted across the outdoor plaza. Cantilevers jut out from the upper floors, creating a massive roof hanging over the entryway. A 6-story, outdoor staircase required by the local fire marshal sticks out from a corner.

The building could also serve as a laboratory experiment that may provide clues for entrepreneurs, real estate developers and architects on what post-pandemic office buildings will look like and how they will be used. That’s because Krause Group plans to soon undergo significant changes in its mission and staffing.

The westside of downtown Des Moines once was a barren wasteland of unattractive commercial buildings, vacant properties and very little pedestrian foot traffic, Rob Whitehead, an Iowa State University architecture professor, told CoStar News.

“It used to be parking lots and car dealerships,” said Whitehead, who wasn’t involved in the Gateway Center’s design. “It was awful. All the businesses huddled around a handful of blocks, but no pedestrian traffic at all.”

An apocalyptic scene in a 1980s zombie movie was shot in the neighborhood because the film producers knew it would be deserted, Whitehead said.

Fast forward to 2023 and downtown Des Moines’ westside doesn’t seem like a place where zombies would roam. Public art dots the 13-acre Pappajohn Sculpture Park. Workers in the neighborhood’s office buildings and a large hospital can walk to nearby restaurants for lunch.

City leaders launched an urban revitalization effort in the 1990s that has transformed several pockets of downtown Des Moines, the capital and largest city in Iowa. The Gateway Center, named to reflect its position as a welcome point for that part of town, opened in 2018 and has kept the momentum going for the westside’s revitalization, Whitehead said.

“The most important corporations in our city showed their belief in Des Moines by locating themselves around the sculpture park,” Whitehead said.

Dotdash Meredith, Nationwide Insurance and Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield occupy offices adjacent or near the park.

In addition to the three acres for its headquarters, Krause Group also acquired other buildings in the neighborhood and renovated some into apartments, offices and restaurants.

One is a former Chevrolet dealership that the company leases to Big Grove Brewery. Krause Group frequently hosts employee events at the brewery, including viewing parties for the company-owned Parma Calcio, a professional men's soccer team in the Italian Serie B soccer league, the second-highest division of Italian soccer.

The Iowa prairie grass planted in the Gateway Center’s outdoor plaza serves as a visual connection to the Pappajohn Sculpture Park located directly across Grand Avenue that is named for local benefactors John and Mary Pappajohn, not the Papa John’s pizza chain.

“You can easily see how the design approach allows the site to become a bridge to the park,” Scott Colman, a professor of architecture and urban history at Rice University in Houston, told CoStar News. He wasn’t involved with the design.

The Gateway Center ground floor occupies 25% of the total building footprint and each floor gets larger as the building goes up, creating what the project’s structural engineering firm, Robert Silman Associates, described as “exaggerated cantilevers."

Not all of Piano’s designs have been as well-received as the Gateway Center. The Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, designed by Piano, has been criticized for seeming too bulky for its location in New York’s West Village.

“It is an awkward hulk, lurching this way and that with a clumsy gait, somehow managing to channel the nearby vernacular of warehouse sheds, refrigeration stores and district heating plants into one gigantic industrial lump,” architecture critic Oliver Wainwright wrote in 2015 for the Guardian.

In contrast, Piano and his team designed the Gateway Center so it would connect with the local neighborhood, Paul Mankins, an architect at the Des Moines firm Substance Architecture, told CoStar News.

The fifth floor is rotated 16 degrees clockwise from the building’s western face, a design flourish intended to represent how the city block where the Gateway Center is located marks a shift in the Des Moines city grid.

“Honestly, I think it both fits in that part of Des Moines and is trying to make a statement,” said Mankins, who wasn’t involved in the design. “It’s tailored in a way that’s site-specific. It is bespoke, created for our city.”

Inside the main lobby of the Gateway Center, the 29-foot-tall, clear glass walls provide direct views of the sculpture park. Employees sit at an Italian café, open to the public, in a corner of the lobby with its own views of the park.

Light-colored wood panels and lighting suspended from the ceiling by long steel fixtures comprise the lobby’s sparse decor. The natural light is so abundant that the interior lights are frequently turned off, said Mike Larson, Krause Group’s manager of corporate facilities.

As Larson and Erica Turner, Krause Group's communications director, take the elevator down to the basement, a fitness room appears that is equipped with elliptical exercise equipment and showers so employees can clean off before returning to their desks.

The basement has a room for bicycle storage for bike commuters. It’s next to the entry door for deliveries, where Krause Group leaves a basket of apples, bananas and oranges for delivery drivers.

Larson and Turner walk to a staircase that opens to the building’s top floor and is filled with a hanging sculpture of colored glass shapes. The stairs lead to floors where most employees work. Desks for non-executive employees are placed closest to exterior glass walls so they enjoy the best views of the surrounding neighborhood.

Most employees who work at the Gateway Center are assigned to Kum & Go. But Krause Group owns a diverse set of businesses in sports, Italian wineries and resorts, agriculture and commercial real estate.

Because Krause Group is always changing, the Gateway Center was designed to be flexible for the company’s future needs. The building also received LEED Gold certification through its use of sustainable materials, high-efficiency lighting and management of the waste created during construction.

And a significant change is on the horizon. Krause Group is waiting on federal regulatory approval for the sale of Kum & Go to Salt Lake City-based convenience store chain Maverik.

If Kum & Go-assigned employees leave the Gateway Center, Larson said space will be repurposed for other uses. The building also has a floor that is completely unfinished that could be converted for new purposes.

The building could become primarily offices for an expansion professional soccer team owned by Krause Group. The USL Championship professional soccer league recently approved a franchise for Des Moines. The team, Pro Iowa, will play in a proposed stadium located on a former Superfund site a few blocks from the Gateway Center.

It could also house employees from an unknown business that Krause Group may acquire. Or, the role of the office could permanently change. The Gateway Center can hold 800 employees at a time, but only about 360 workers swipe keycards on a typical workday, meaning it is usually less than half-occupied.

“We’re not going back to five days a week,” Krause said.

It’s beneficial to have workers in the office “to collaborate, to come up with ideas,” Krause said, “but there is also a work-life balance issue.”

Symbols of the Krause family’s interests and pursuits are spread throughout the Gateway Center.

Holdings from the family’s extensive personal art collection hang on walls throughout the building. The family occasionally hosts public viewings of their collection, which features works by Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince.

As Larson and Turner take the elevator to the rooftop, knee-high prairie grass covering the roof come into view. The prairie grass is a reflection of the interests of Kyle Krause’s wife, Sharon, who is a sheep farmer in rural Iowa. Gravel paths wind among the grasses, recalling the thousands of miles of gravel roads that crisscross Iowa’s prairies and corn fields. Employees can work from benches placed among the grass.

Also on the roof is a 100-foot-tall metal pole that the company describes as a metaphorical antenna that communicates with the hundreds of locations of Kum & Go convenience stores across the Midwest. But the pole has no function. Instead, it’s a design element that Krause wanted to reflect his love of sailing. The pole is supposed to be the main mast for a sailboat.

One of the family’s goals in hiring Piano was to add to Des Moines’ collection of notable works of architecture, Krause said.

The copper-colored Des Moines Public Library, designed by 2023 Pritzker Prize-winning architect David Chipperfield, zigzags its way across an entire downtown city block. The black-steel Catholic Pastoral Center was designed as a bank by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The 1962 building recently underwent a $10 million renovation.

Krause took several steps in the building’s design that weren’t necessary and likely were expensive, showing he was serious about the building’s civic role, said Colman, the Rice University professor.

Many office buildings use every square inch of an urban lot to maximize the financial benefit, he said. The huge, sweeping cantilevers are one of the most noticeable design features of the Gateway Center but would have been expensive to engineer and construct. Krause Group didn't provide a breakout of the costs for the cantilevers.

The family financed the building construction through a combination of equity, financing and state and local incentives, Turner said. She declined to provide more details on the financing.

Another corporate executive may not have made the same decisions, Colman said.

“It’s a very enlightened approach today,” Colman said. “It’s a return to a kind of public responsibility that most corporations seem to have forgot.”