Westland City Hall

Cohesive, Reimagined Space for City Hall Engenders Community Pride

The City of Westland, Michigan hired OHM Advisors to create a solution for a half-century-long problem of spending large sums of money on quick fixes to an aging city hall building that was built upon an underground stream and perpetually flooded—while still operating four additional buildings to house its staff. The setup was inefficient for government, inconvenient for residents, and a deterrent to new business development in the city. We worked closely with the city and its residents in an active engagement process, to understand how to include all of the city department pieces into a retrofit of a former Circuit City building in a design usable and accessible to the public.

Our team of architects worked across the firm’s service disciplines to create a progressive ‘one-stop government shop’—which includes multiple department offices, a city council chambers, a broadcast studio and multi-purpose meeting rooms. The reinvented building façade boasts expansive glass panels, and daylight now floods an open concept interior, evoking transparency and connectedness between the city and its visiting constituents. A large entrance canopy connects the building to the new, extensive outdoor green space. The money-saving end result transforms an abandoned building into a functional, modern and environmentally-friendly community resource that unifies city offices, warmly accommodates citizens, and creates a vibrant new entrance to the city’s shop-and-dine district, attracting new investment to the area.

Project Highlights: architecture, office, civic, government buildings, renovation, adaptive reuse, sustainable design, workplace environments