Nonprofit and creative offices · Kansas City and the Midwest

Buildings for people
who answer to a board

The money came from someone who meant it for the mission, the schedule is set by a lease you cannot break, and the result has to be explainable at an annual meeting. We have built for service organisations, makers and small firms on exactly those terms.

Send an addressSee the work
A-1.0

A gift is not
a construction
loan

A nonprofit does not buy a building the way an owner-operator does. The money came from somebody who meant it for the mission, the schedule is set by a lease you cannot break, and a board has to be able to explain the result at an annual meeting. That changes the architecture, not only the contract.

Every dollar is visible

Donor optics

A marble lobby reads differently when the money came from a capital campaign. We design to a number you can defend out loud, and we put the spend where a visitor will understand it — the rooms where the work happens, not the ones where it is described.

You cannot close for a year

Staged occupancy

Programmes keep running through construction. That means phasing, temporary everything, and a sequence drawn before the first demolition rather than negotiated during it. It is slower on paper and faster in practice.

The board has to see it

Drawings a committee can read

A permit set is not a board packet. Decisions get made by people who do not read plans for a living and are personally responsible for the outcome, so the work has to be legible to them without being dumbed down.

The lease clock, not the market clock

A date you do not control

Most of these projects are governed by a lease ending on a fixed day. Everything else — design, permit, bid, move — gets scheduled backwards from that, and the first question we ask is what happens if it slips.

Credits and grants keep their own calendar

Parts 1, 2 and 3

Historic credits on the building, New Markets on a community facility, state programmes on top, and each with its own filing window. Missing one is not a delay, it is a hole in the budget.

Creative tenants want the bones

Daylight, structure, big glass

Design studios, makers and small firms do not want a finished office. They want the deck exposed, the window wall intact and rent that leaves money for the work. The cheapest beautiful space in any city is the one that already exists.

A-2.0

Who we have
done it for

Service organisations, a bakery turned into shops and studios, and a Carnegie library. Different budgets, the same problem: a building has to carry a mission that was there before it and will outlast it.

Life Unlimited

320 Armour Boulevard

Offices for a Kansas City organisation supporting people with developmental disabilities — the Armour Boulevard headquarters renovation, a rebuilt kitchen, an outdoor patio, and a day centre in Lee’s Summit. Small projects, repeatedly, for the same client over several years, which is the only real test of whether this kind of work goes well.

Wonder Shops + Flats

30th and Troost · $16MM

The Wonder Bread bakery, with commercial and creative space at the sidewalk under the flats. The ground floor is what makes the block work; an empty one would have made the whole building feel like a gated community with apartments in it.

Netherland Monarch

Midtown Kansas City

Two Midtown buildings brought back together, now at 95% occupancy.

Carnegie, Leavenworth

601 South 5th Street

A Carnegie library on the historic credit path since 2016 — Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 filed, and the window restoration scope still in front of the city this year. A reminder that on a building like this the patient documentation is most of the job.

The Wonder Bread bakery at 30th and Troost before the work
The same building as Wonder Shops + Flats, with commercial space at the sidewalk
The Netherland Monarch buildings in Midtown before restoration
The restored Netherland Monarch buildings, now at 95% occupancy

Send us
an address

There are three ways people bring us in.

  1. You need a preservationistNational Register nomination, Part 1, 2 and 3, SHPO and NPS review, and the documentation that keeps a credit from being clawed back later.
  2. You need an architect and engineerDrawings, structure and MEP in house, the permit set, and construction administration through certificate of occupancy.
  3. You need the whole projectFeasibility through opening day — design, the incentive stack and construction under one contract, with one name on it.

Tell us which one you are. Or send an address and we will tell you.

Send an address 816.200.0340
Somebody walked past
every one of these EXACT Architects — Kansas City

EXACT Architects
3901 Main Street, Suite 201
Kansas City, Missouri 64111
816.200.0340
office@exactarchitects.com

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