andrew j. gilles

*Winner of 2022 Central States AIA Excellence in Architecture Honor Award!

*Winner of the 2023 AIA St. Louis Merit Award for Architecture

The Light Rail Station Improvements seek to holistically improve the transit patron experience. Improving wayfinding, function, safety, comfort and accessibility while cultivating a better sense of arrival appropriately in keeping with a world-class medical center and urban surroundings. The design improvements seek to transform the current setting into a dignified and welcoming setting in the following ways:

  A new Welcome Center and Ticket Kiosk are designed underneath the existing pedestrian bridge. The bridge provides shelter from the elements for these functions while also serving to create a gateway to the Medical Center.

A new elevator provides accessibility to the platform in a more visible location.  Enhancing safety, the elevator strategically places glass to create views in and out.

The platform-level canopy provides patrons increased shelter while minimizing visual barriers. The canopy design emphasizes lightness and see-and-be-seen transparency. Fritted glass will temper the sun’s heat during warmer months. At night, the entire canopy will glow with a lantern-like quality.

Design takes into consideration operational ease and long-term maintenance as well as constructability and cost effectiveness, the station is required to still be in operation throughout construction.

Project Team

Principal In Charge- John Burse

Project Designer- Andrew Gilles

Project Architect- Jake Banton & Gregory Keppel

Project Manager- Jen Wilkins

Photography- Sam Fentress

*2018 PCI Design Awards- Best Mixed Use Building

4260 Forest Park Building at the entrance of the Cortex Innovation Community is a 3-story, 62,000 sf mixed use development housing TechShop "maker space"- fabrication, prototyping, hackerspace, and learning center- Vicia Restaurant, and Alcami Laboratory and high tech office space.

Project Designer- Andrew Gilles AIA LEED AP

Project Architect/Manager- Craig Norman AIA

Project Architect-  Kevin Zwick

A 30,000 SF special purpose school serving children with communicative disorders an other sensory needs, in Jackson MS.

Mackey Mitchell Architects:

Principal in Charge- Marcus Adrian

Design Architect- Andrew Gilles

Project Architect- Sara Ferguson

Project Manager- Mathew Roeder

Interior Design- Andrew Gilles & Shelby Barker

*Winner of 2021 AIA Eastern New York Design Award!

*Winner of the 2023 ACUI Facility Design Award of Excellence!

*Winner of the 2023 AIA St. Louis Distinguished Award for Architecture

As campuses embrace changing trends and expectations, incorporating them all into renovations in an integrated way brings great challenges. The original Schine Student Center faced significant hurdles: confusing circulation; hard-to-find student support program spaces; outdated dining model; and poor accommodation of those with differing abilities and backgrounds.

The Syracuse University alumni-led team of Mackey Mitchell and Ashley McGraw Architects completed the 108,000 SF renovation, creating a welcoming and vibrant heart of the campus where students can come for a multitude of services and activities. The center atrium was opened to bring in more light and connection; the student activities and cultural centers are in new front-and-center spaces.

Team:

John Burse- Principal in Charge

Dan Schneider- Project Manager

Andrew Gilles- Senior Designer

John Brown- Project Architect

Merrilee Hertlein- Interior Designer

Shelby Barker- Interior Design Assistant

Ashley McGraw Architects- Prime Architect

Photography: Halkin | Mason Photography

The clients for this project are a close knit group of friends with modest budgets looking to build a summer cabin to share outside of Whitefish, Montana. The program requirements were to create a gathering place for friends and families which offered both a sense of community as well as privacy and solitude. Due to budget constraints the project had to be minimal, scalable, local, sustainable, and affordable.

So my approach to this project is really a love letter to my childhood memories of summers camping and staying in primitive cabins in Montana. Cabins without indoor plumbing or electricity.

The design of this project centers around a public “lodge” which houses showers, restroom, kitchen, indoor and outdoor dining as well as a fire pit. This is the gathering place. The kitchen. The fire. The place where stories are told and guitars are played and the only place that you can charge your cell phone on the property.

The individual cabins are without water or electricity, they are naturally ventilated, each with a wood stove. The intention is to create the smallest, simplest structure, using local materials. To create our tent. The interior of the cabin is designed to be minimalist and outwardly focused. The mountain view, smell of mountain air and pine, and rustling wind are the elements that the design hopes to put in focus.  The exterior features standing metal seam roof and exterior cladding of rough cut pine. The cladding comes from the nearby forests in the region that have been devastated by the Mountain Pine Beetle. 

*2010 St. Louis AIA Merit Award (unbuilt)

*2012 AIA St. Louis Design Award

*2012 IALD International Lighting Award

*Excellence in Masonry Award

Inspired by the context of the Sonoran Desert, this outpatient cancer center is an oasis of healing for this desert community. Situated on the campus of a community hospital, this center nevertheless stands alone with a distinct identity to serve the specific treatment and psychosocial needs of the cancer patient.

This first phase of a multi-phase project anticipates its antecedent by being organized around a central garden courtyard. Primary circulation and waiting spaces surround the garden, which is characterized by native vegetation and locally quarried boulders arranged in Zen fashion. One of the two primary entries is centered on the courtyard and is marked by its dramatically cantilevered canopy sheltering arriving patients.

Each of the building's elevations responds to the desert environment with its own specificity. The south-facing courtyard elevation protects waiting spaces with louvered sun shading, each blade calibrated to maximize views to the garden for the seated patient while minimizing solar heat gain. The north elevation opens treatment spaces with expansive views to the Superstition Mountains and is punctuated by 2 large balconies for chemotherapy patients to access the outdoors.

The building's iconic tower is an abstraction of the palo verde tree, in arboreal terms a nurse plant for fauna of the desert and an apt metaphor for a building dedicated to healing. 1" thick water-jet cut and bead-blasted aluminum panels rise 64' in the air. An interior scrim of fabric receives the projected image of the foliage in the day, while at night color-changing LED lights transform it into a beacon of cancer awareness. 

Principal Designer-  David Polzin, AIA, LEED AP

Project Designer-  Andrew Gilles, AIA LEED AP

Project Designer- Jonathan Wirth, AIA, LEED AP

Project Architect-  Matthew Foreman, AIA, LEED AP

Project Manager-  Jeff Nudi, PE, LEED AP

Architect-  Belinda Manuel, AIA, LEED AP

Architect-  Dan Wiechel, RA LEED AP

Healthcare Planner-  Natalie Petzoldt, AIA, LEED AP, BD+C, EDAC

Mackey Mitchell Architects in a joint venture with Manning Architects MAMMA

The new facility consolidates Delgado’s Nursing and Allied Health programs, alleviating the current inefficiencies of programs spread across numerous buildings on the City Park and Charity School of Nursing campuses. Many of the existing program spaces were undersized for current needs, limiting effectiveness and any opportunity for growth. The new building provides next-generation facilities and technology for the next generation of nurses and allied health professionals, including traditional lecture classrooms, advanced labs simulating real-world healthcare delivery settings, and a virtual hospital floor.

Project Designer: Andrew Gilles

Project Manager: Beth Kutterer Sanchez

Project Architect: Sara Ferguson, Mathew Roeder, Preston Scott

Mackey Mitchell Architects collaborated with HERA Laboratory Planners for the SIUE Nursing and Allied Health Building Feasibility Study

When designing this building the team lead an exercise in which the users designed their ideal Nursing School using cut out “blocks” of program. During this interactive design exercise, it became clear that the faculty and administrators desired a building with one central control room at its core, surrounded by SIM labs and classrooms, with a public corridor at the perimeter.

This scheme was soon dubbed the “raceway scheme”, because of its track-like public corridor. It was evaluated against more traditional single and double loaded corridor schemes and proved to be the most functional, whilst also being very competitive in terms of efficiency.

The buildings student lounge program was broken up into smaller lounges, study areas, and collaboration spaces and sprinkled in several locations along the raceway creating a variety of social student experiences with natural daylight and views.

 Exterior Design

The design fits seamlessly into the fabric of the SIUE campus. It’s materiality, massing, and form complement the surrounding architecture while boldly looking toward the future. The design conveys an image of transparency, openness, and high-tech modernity that embodies the history and exciting future of the SIUE Nursing program

Architect- Mackey Mitchell Architects

Lab Consultant- HERA

This 141,000 sf Children’s Specialty Care Center expands children’s health services to West St. louis County. The facility accommodates sophisticated medical technology in a space that makes kids of all ages feel comfortable. The building houses specialists in nearly 20 areas, including allergy, immunology, pulmonology, cardiology, orthopedics, otolaryngology, plastic surgery, and includes 3 operating rooms.

The building is prominently located at Interstate 64/40 and Mason Road, bordering a suburban residential neighborhood. The site and design command an inviting presence from the highway, while respecting the adjacent neighborhood.

The interior is organized by a main circulation spine and waiting areas on the North side of the building. This ensures that all waiting areas have direct access and/or views to the garden. Focusing outward to nature instead of inward will lesson the anxiety of patients and parents.

The interior design is based on the theme of “imagination and discovery” focusing on opportunities to play, socialize, fantasize, explore and experience. Upon arrival each child is given a special “passport” where they can receive destination stamps as they “travel” through different departments throughout the building or undergo tests, scans, or procedures, transforming a potentially frightening experience into one of surprise and delight.

The interior organization and garden drive the form and character of the building. The North elevation consist of a playfully kinked and colored glass window wall, allowing maximum transparency to waiting areas. The south (highway) elevation contain the diagnostic and treatment areas of the facility. Playful punches of color in addition to Children’s hospitals “blue band” establish the brand identity to the community.

Project Designer- Andrew Gilles AIA LEED AP

Project Manager- Mathew Jeans

Project Architect- Tumelo Schultz

Architect- Andrew Petty

Architect- Katie Reitz

Healthcare Planner- Dan Brown

Healthcare Planner- Natalie Petzoldt

Interior Designer- Susanna DeFrancesco

*2014 AIA St. Louis Honor Award

This small research laboratory sited in a remote East Tennessee valley on the corner of a wooded site brings together scientists for the study of energy use in the built environment. Housing a unique apparatus that simulates various climatic conditions -- known as the "clam shell" for its bivalve-like construction -- the testing environment itself must meet rigorous standards of isolation from thermal and psychrometric swings while providing a workspace that has access to daylight and natural ventilation. The goal is to reserve site energy for the testing being conducted while minimizing site energy use for the building's operation.

To accomplish these standards and goals, the high-bay laboratory is conceived as a translucent cube which is then sheltered by wrapping it in its support functions. The offices unfurl around the lab, transparent to the testing environment so that researchers have visual access to their work at all times. Instead of being at the ground level, offices are lifted to a level above providing unimpeded access to the test space.

The result is a luminous box that reveals itself at select moments from behind a heavy veil. That veil itself is relieved by bands of glass, its surface appropriated and divided to provide views to the surrounding landscape. More overtly solid than transparent, the building appears to be lit from within creating a play between mass and light.

Project Designer- David Polzin, AIA, LEED

Designer/Project Architect- Andrew Gilles, AIA LEED

Project Principal- Thomas Harvath, AIA

Project Manager- Rich Bacino, RA

Project Architect- Kyle Thiel, AIA, LEED

Project Architect- Jennifer Cayton, AIA, LEED

Proposal to renovate the historic Brauer Supply building and build a new 160 key boutique hotel in the heart of the Cortex Innovation District.

Project Designer-Andrew Gilles AIA LEED AP

Design Proposals for the historic Crescent Building in the Cortex Innovation District. Proposals include Micro Lofts, High tech office space, and High bay Laboratory.

Project Designer- Andrew Gilles AIA LEED AP

Lobby and interior design for the LEED Gold, 659,000, 11-story Facility housing Washington University School of Medicine and BJC Healthcare.

Project Designer David Polzin AIA LEED AP

Interior Designer/Project Architect Lynn Grossman AIA LEED AP

Interior Designer/Project Architect Andrew Gilles AIA LEED AP

Project Architect Joe Sweitzer AIA

Project Manager Jim Walsh AIA

Masterplanning and Schematic Design for the Anchutz Inpatient Pavillion, a $400 million, 600,000 sf expansion to the University of Colorado Hospital. A Bed tower expansion of 250 beds, relocation of the emergency department and expansion to a level one trauma center, surgery expansion, and cardiovascular expansion. Architect of Record HDR.

Project Designer- David Polzin AIA LEED AP

Designer- Andrew Gilles AIA LEED AP

Designer -Jonathan Wirth AIA LEED AP

Healthcare Planner- Lori Epler LEED AP

Project Manager- Jim Walsh AIA

*2006 AIA St. Louis Design Award