Wexford 4220 Innovation Hall Renovation Kitchen and Café

Founded in 2002, The Cortex District is an innovation hub that caters to bioscience and technology research, development, and commercialization and houses startup programs and established companies. This project was a 1st floor tenant buildout of the new building shell space at 4220 Duncan Ave. Known as Innovation Hall, the main component is a free coworking space targeted to creatives and startups. To attract new people to the Cortex district, Venture Café St. Louis, a non-profit that hosts networking and other such events, decided to expand Innovation Hall to include features that would encourage more people to explore the expanding district and discover what the area has to offer outside of just offices for large corporations.

McClure Engineering provided kitchen hood exhaust and make-up air from the 1^st floor to the 5^th floor roof for the full-service restaurant and bar known as The Chocolate Pig. For the coworking space, a lobby area market and rentable gathering rooms including a 230-seat auditorium were incorporated. The auditorium includes a speaker’s platform and is dividable into three smaller rooms with movable partitions. As there are office spaces located on the floor directly above the auditorium, McClure was challenged with isolating the sound systems. By designing an acoustic system on the underside of the 2^nd floor to isolate the areas which were without the benefit of an auditorium ceiling, this challenge was overcome. Because the space is subdivided by two different entities, utilities needed to be separately metered. McClure provided separate utility metering for the coworking and restaurant sub-tenants.

This project was designed with support from Webb Engineering (a Minority Business Enterprise) on plumbing & electrical systems.