Accident Fund New National Headquarters

Key to the revitalization of downtown Lansing, Michigan, the redevelopment of the historic, National Register Ottawa Street Power Station into Class A office space is a testament to the power of partnership. Located on a seven-acre riverfront campus, the project site included the power plant and spanned two city blocks from Ottawa Street to Shiawassee Street, between Grand Avenue and the Grand River. This once-empty shell of a building, accompanied by a modern, four-story addition, is now transformed into an award-winning, state-of-the-art, nine story office complex providing over 300,000 square feet of office space for current and future Accident Fund employees.

The power plant, which was decommissioned in 1992, was retrofitted with a chilled water plant and high-pressure steam distribution facility in 2001 to provide cooling for downtown businesses but had otherwise stood in obsolescence since that time. Constructed in 1939, it is considered to be one of the finest examples of classic Art Deco architecture, with many distinctive features incorporated by Bowd-Munson, renowned architects of the period. These features include a stepped roofline, building and windows shaped to represent a stylized plume of fire, and exterior building colors symbolizing the combustion of coal, starting with black granite at the base, giving way to purple grey in the lower masonry, and continuing to red and yellow bricks that lighten in hue as the “flame” rises.