Saint Paul’s Forgotten Warehouse Finds New Life as a Film Arts Center
D/O Architects · 2441 Arts · Saint Paul, Minnesota · 2025
In 1930, Clarence Johnston — the architect who shaped Summit Hill’s most distinguished homes and defined the University of Minnesota’s campus — turned his attention to something humbler: a furniture warehouse on Saint Paul’s east side. For decades, the Brown-Jaspers Building stood largely forgotten, its art deco sandstone facade quietly outlasting the commerce it was built to serve. Then D/O Architects saw something else entirely — and Saint Paul’s Creative Enterprise Zone would never look the same.
Today, 2441 Arts is Saint Paul’s most surprising new creative destination — a film arts center where a soaring handcrafted wood form rises three stories toward a 70-foot skylight, and where a century-old loading dock has been reimagined as an outdoor cinema under the stars.
The Brown-Jaspers Building presented a paradox common to the best historic preservation projects: its greatest asset was also its greatest constraint. Structurally sound and remarkably untouched after nearly a century, the building’s integrity demanded respect. Every design decision had to honor what Clarence Johnston built while transforming a dark, industrial interior into a high-performance creative environment fit for the 21st century.
The site compounded the challenge. The site’s topography left the main level partially below grade — a space that had spent a hundred years as a furniture showroom starved of natural light. FilmNorth’s vision demanded something entirely different: an open, luminous gathering place that could serve simultaneously as classroom, cinema, community hub, and creative workspace. Bringing light into that buried level without compromising the historic shell above was the central design problem D/O Architects set out to solve.
D/O Architects’ answer was as bold as it was precise. Rather than fighting the building’s industrial nature, they revealed it. A narrow atrium was carved through three floors, peeling back the interior to expose Clarence Johnston’s original white steel trusses — structural bones that had been hidden for nearly a century. Above them, a new skylight was introduced not as a passive opening but as a lens, focusing natural light downward through the full height of the building and into the partially below-grade main level.
Into this luminous atrium D/O inserted its counterpoint — a digitally fabricated vessel clad entirely in solid white ash, rising through the building as its creative core. Where the atrium reaches toward light, the vessel embraces darkness. It holds what cinema demands: intimacy, enclosure, and total control of the visual field. The 54-person microcinema anchors the vessel’s program, surrounded by collaborative studios, community spaces, and catwalks that connect occupants across every floor.
The white ash itself carries its own quiet story. Sourced from trees lost to the emerald ash borer’s devastation across Minnesota, the reclaimed wood finds new life as the building’s defining material — lining the vessel, warming the interiors, and connecting 2441 Arts to the landscape of the region it serves.
— Colin Oglesbay, AIA · Managing Principal, D/O Architects
2441 Arts was designed to do more than inspire — it was designed to sustain. FilmNorth, Saint Paul’s leading independent film arts organization, anchors the building as its primary tenant. Their offices, teaching spaces, and the 54-person microcinema occupy the heart of the vessel, giving the organization a permanent creative home after years without one. Critically, the building’s rental structure returns revenue directly to FilmNorth’s operating costs — making 2441 Arts not just a headquarters but a financial engine for the arts programming it houses.
— Andrew Peterson · Executive Director, FilmNorth
The timing could not be more significant. As arts organizations across the country navigate shrinking budgets and uncertain funding, 2441 Arts offers a different model — one where the building itself becomes a stakeholder in the mission it serves.
The transformation doesn’t stop at the front door. Behind the building, where delivery trucks once idled at a century-old loading dock, D/O Architects imagined something entirely different. A new landscape plaza now frames one of Saint Paul’s most unexpected outdoor destinations — flexible informal seating for daytime community gathering gives way at night to a formal outdoor cinema, where a building-mounted projection system turns the back of a 1930s warehouse into a screen under the open sky.
The plaza also quietly continues the building’s environmental story. Native plants and grasses replace what was once continuous dark pavement, relieving the urban heat island effect of the surrounding post-industrial neighborhood. Stormwater is harvested and infiltrated beneath the plaza — the landscape working as hard as the architecture above it.
2441 Arts opened its doors in July 2025, completing a journey that began when D/O Architects looked at a forgotten furniture warehouse and saw something the city hadn’t yet imagined. The building that Clarence Johnston built to store furniture now stores something far more valuable — creativity, community, and a model for what historic architecture can offer a city willing to look at its past with fresh eyes.
For D/O Architects, 2441 Arts represents the fullest expression of a design philosophy that has guided the firm from the beginning: that the most powerful architecture doesn’t erase history — it completes it. That preservation and innovation are not opposing forces but collaborators. And that sometimes the most radical thing a building can do is simply remember what it was, and dare to become something more.
Project 2441 Arts — Film Arts Center
Location Saint Paul, Minnesota — Creative Enterprise Zone
Client FilmNorth
Architect D/O Architects — Colin Oglesbay, AIA, Managing Principal
Building Brown-Jaspers Store Building, 1930 (Clarence Johnston, Architect)
Size 24,000 square feet across four floors
Grand Opening July 2025
Program 54-seat microcinema, film studios, collaborative workspaces, FilmNorth offices, outdoor cinema plaza, five creative tenant suites, community kitchen.
Sustainability LEED Gold certification pending; 3,500 tons of embodied carbon saved through preservation
Photography Chad Holder Photography
