Frankly, if ole Buzz had simply gone with a less eogtistical architect, he'd probably be breaking ground on his sales center as we speak.

I don't necessarily disagree that the developer here got a bum deal with the land swap. Doing that in good faith, going through a long regulatory process, and then being shot down at the last minute *is* unfair.

But again, that's not the LoDo board's fault. It's the City Council's fault for enacting a dysfunctional process.

The thing is, I'm not so much a historicist as an ornamentalist. I don't want historic buildings, I want contemporary buildings with human-scaled ornament. I will THIS over THIS 10 times out of 10. I come off as a historicist because right now the contemporary architecture community is not very interested in human-scaled ornament.

Anyway, I think I've been pretty reasonable in this thread. My point here hasn't been to complain about the design of this tower (though I do think it would go out of style quickly), as much as it's been to point out that the LoDo board didn't do anything wrong here. They're charged with a specific task, which they carried out to the letter. If the city feels this particular development outweighs the task set before the LoDo board, or that this site shouldn't be held to the LoDo standards, that's totally fine, but the onus to make that type of decision is on the City Council. It's certainly not up to the LoDo board to assume powers it doesn't have!

Whatever our aesthetic differences, we should not be condemning the LoDo board for doing its job. Condemn the process for failing to account for exceptions or failing to define what we want from LoDo, and demand the City Council fix those problems, but for goodness sake don't attack public volunteers for doing exactly what the city asked them to do.

I don't mind a low-rise one bit and definitely understand that the city benefits from street level improvements that add culture and activity more so that it does from height. But I also don't like to see height shut down unnecessarily by an unreasonable bureaucratic process.

sc48:

But this ain't really Lodo; it's merley an ugly parking lot just beyond the edge of Lodo. A high-rise would work perfectly here. Massing the project into something more slender actually does better to preserve the view of real Lodo.

And the truth is, height gives more significance to a building with bold design such as the one proposed here. A bold addition to a relatively bland skyline is very valuable.

Check this out…

http://www.dynamicarchitecture.net/home.html

Moscow and Dubai…could we get one in Denver?

But that's getting off topic. Why not petition City Council to remove this site from the district entirely? Its inclusion has never made much sense to me, as there are NO historic buildings on the block bounded by Fourteenth, Speer, Larimer and Market. LoDo is a big rectangle–this is like a Florida, dangling off of a lower corner of the main body of the district. If I could go back in time, I'd prevent the city from tearing down the old City Hall, which was a magnificent and historic pile of masonry. But it's too late for that, and we're better off as a city with a project that expresses the culture and design preferences of our time, however "trendy" they may be.
(Historymystery)