Clyfford Still Museum Groundbreaking

Archive of entries posted on December 2009

Clyfford Still Museum Groundbreaking

Posted by Ken Schroeppel on December 30, 2009

Two weeks ago, the official groundbreaking ceremony was held on the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver’s Civic Center district. The $29 million museum is planned for the southeast corner of W. 13th Avenue and Bannock Street on the same block as the Denver Art Museum’s Frederick Hamilton building. The Clyfford Still Museum’s presence in Denver is not only a major coup for the city, but its location in Civic Center will further enhance that district’s cultural and architectural appeal.

The ceremony on December 14 involved not so much the breaking of ground, but more the breaking of old walls. Located on the museum site were a couple of small buildings that were ceremoniously wrecked while fireworks went off to launch the museum’s construction phase. I was unable to attend the event, but I finally had a chance to swing by the site the other day. The old buildings are totally gone and the site awaits excavation.

The buildings that were demolished are the ones closest to the corner of 13th and Bannock in the bird’s eye photo (left) of the site from Bing maps. On the right is a picture of the site I took a few days ago:

For a short video clip of the ceremony, check out this website.

The new 30,000 square foot building will be complete in 2011. Renderings of the new museum structure are available here. Finally, here’s an informative press release from the museum that discusses the building’s exterior and interior design. Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture is the designer.

Having another new museum in the Civic Center/Golden Triangle area is absolutely exciting. But our museum-packed cultural district is still surrounded by ugly surface parking lots that have defied development for several decades, despite their artsy neighbors. As I’ve explained before in a previous post, part of the problem with the ubiquitous parking lots around there is that most of the lots are actually comprised of numerous small parcels owned by different property owners, which makes land assemblage in the area virtually impossible. I’ve heard reports that there is a mid-rise apartment project being planned for around 12th and Cherokee, which is good news, but really… when are we going to do something to break the parking lot log-jam in the Golden Triangle? Something to think about while we celebrate the start of construction for yet another new museum in Downtown Denver.

Filed under Architecture, Arts & Culture, Civic Center, Golden Triangle, Infill, Parking.

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Historic 17th Street Bank to Become Hotel

Posted by Ken Schroeppel on December 24, 2009

You may have read about this a few days ago in Margaret Jackson’s article in the Denver Post, but Stonebridge Companies, a major Denver-based hospitality management and development firm, has recently purchased the former Colorado National Bank building at 17th and Champa in Downtown Denver.

The historic bank building, built in 1915, is a contributing structure to the Downtown Denver Historic District. Its neoclassical design was intended to convey a sense of respectability and security that one expects from a bank. In fact, when it opened, the bank’s boast was “the bank that looks like a bank”. The original 1915 structure included only the first three floors. In 1926, an addition matching the original design was added along Champa Street, and then in 1964, an additional three floors were added featuring a design with a modern interpretation of the neoclassical base. On the left is a DenverInfill photo of the building from 2006 and on the right a Bing maps bird’s eye photo (click to embiggen):

For more on the building’s history, please read Shawn’s post over at the Denver History Tours blog. Shawn also has a follow-up post about the building’s beautiful murals inside. Also check out the building’s page at the Historic Denver website.

The building has sat vacant since 2007, and the building’s Champa Street side near the bus stop is particularly shabby looking. Anyway, the good news is that Stonebridge is planning on converting the building into a boutique hotel and adding a few floors in the process. JG Johnson Architects has been given the task of adding a contemporary addition above the 1960s addition which sits above the 1915 original base. That will be an interesting architectural challenge. I have no problem philosophically, however, with adding yet another addition to this building. Buildings, even historic buildings, need to evolve and flex over time to stay relevant and contributing to the vibrancy of the city.

Hopefully this proposal will stay on track and, in a few years, we’ll have a new hotel operating along 17th Street in a repurposed and scrubbed-up and slightly taller historic building that will thrive well into the new century.

Filed under Adaptive Reuse, Architecture, Central Downtown, Historic Preservation, Hospitality.

8 Comments

Welcome to the New DenverInfill Blog!

Posted by Ken Schroeppel on December 20, 2009

Surprise! The DenverInfill blog has a new look and is now powered by WordPress. Here’s the story behind the change and what’s in store for DenverInfill in the year to come.

You may have noticed the new tagline above. It used to say: “News, ideas, and commentary about Downtown Denver and its urban infill developments.” Now it reads: “News, ideas, and commentary about urbanism in the Mile High City.” With the new wording, two differences are evident:

First, the new focus of the blog will be urbanism, the mix of physical, political, economic, geographic, cultural, and other factors that together create the wonderfully messy places we call cities. Infill development is obviously a big part of the urban environment these days, so that aspect of urbanism will continue to get a lot of coverage here at DenverInfill. But now the full spectrum of urbanism will be up for discussion: transit, public spaces, architecture, sustainability, urban policies, and so on. I’ve been heading in that direction anyway in my blog posts over the past year or so; now I’m just making it official.

Part of this also has to do with the limitations of the DenverInfill website. I created it in 2004 sort of on a whim and as a hobby. At that time, I didn’t think much about the issue of keeping it up-to-date over the long haul. Building it was a lot of work, but it was fun and, for the first few years, I was able to keep the website relatively current tracking new projects, updating construction photos, and whatnot, despite the fact that just adding one new project to the website involved a complicated, time-consuming, multi-step process of rasterizing this and cropping that and html-ing this and FTP-ing that. But for the last two years I have been much busier both at work and with the various boards and committees I’m on; consequently, the project-updating aspects of the website have suffered. I’ve generally kept up with things via the blog, but over time the blog and the website have grown farther apart from each other. Anyway, here’s the deal: Given the website’s baseline is the start of 2000 and the end of 2009 is at hand, that makes a nice even decade. Now seems like a good time to stop. The DenverInfill website will remain as a permanent online archive documenting Downtown Denver’s infill boom from 2000-2009, but its project-tracking days are over. New infill developments, however, will continue to be enthusiastically covered on the blog.

Second, in addition to expanding the focus from infill developments to urbanism in general, the blog will expand its geographic coverage. The DenverInfill blog will be no longer tied to the rigid boundaries of the website. Topics relating to urbanism and city-building from throughout the greater Denver region are now fair game, although most of the discussion will probably remain centered on Denver’s urban core, because that is where my heart is.

Yet another change starting in 2010 will be the introduction of new contributors to the DenverInfill blog. I’ll be inviting people with expertise in a variety of areas—architecture, transit, urban design, real estate development, etc.—to join me in posting about Denver’s urbanism. This will increase both the breadth and depth of the discussion and, hopefully, expand DenverInfill’s reach and influence in the community. It should also increase the frequency of posts to the blog, so that when I’m super busy or out of town, you won’t have to go days on end without a new DenverInfill post. Eventually, the DenverInfill blog will transform into Denver’s online magazine for urban planning, design, and development issues, or something to that effect. I’m also collaborating with someone on another blog/website that will be a nice complement to DenverInfill. More about that when the time comes.

Because the old version of this blog was a self-hosted Blogger blog, there were some limitations to the features available to me. With WordPress, I’ll have more flexibility and options regarding blogging tools and other web gizmos. For example, you’ll notice on the right sidebar we now have Categories. Currently, there are over 500 “Uncategorized” blog posts because, with the switch to WordPress, we imported all 580 posts from the previous Blogger format and all of those came over uncategorized. I’ve edited the most recent 20 or so posts to add the appropriate categories and, over the course of the next month or two, I’ll be working my way backwards in time to eventually categorize all 580 posts. The categories reflect broad urbanism topics or geographic areas and should help make the blog more user-friendly. If you’re looking for something more specific, such as a project name or a particular street, please use the “Search” function at the top of the left sidebar.

Finally, let me end with a few thanks. First, to Patricia at Keynote Support for the great job on importing the old posts from Blogger and customizing the new WordPress template. In 2010 we’ll be adding more features and maybe tweaking the design a bit, but I’m very happy with the new look. Also, let me thank all of you out there who visit DenverInfill. I have run into so many of you at various meetings and events around town and I genuinely appreciate all of the compliments you give me on DenverInfill. I never expected DenverInfill to be as popular as it appears to be, which tells me that there are a lot of people out there who love our city and have a strong desire to see it continue to evolve and grow into the best urban center it can be. That is extremely gratifying and makes my effort totally worth it.

I will conclude with what my mission continues to be in this new era for DenverInfill:

To inspire Denver citizens to envision and strive for exceptional urbanism in their city and region
To inform and educate on topics relating to urban planning and city-building
To serve as an online resource of notable urban projects, plans, and programs throughout Denver
To promote and showcase Denver and its opportunities to the world
To advocate for positive changes to Denver’s existing and future built environment

And, finally, DenverInfill still loathes surface parking lots and seeks their eradication from Denver’s urban core!

Filed under Media, Urbanism.

19 Comments

Auraria Update: Hotel Learning Center

Posted by Ken Schroeppel on December 19, 2009

Another project planned by Metropolitan State College of Denver for the Auraria campus is the Hotel Learning Center. I’ve blogged about this project before, but since then, a few more details have emerged.

The Hotel Learning Center will be a full-fledged hotel/conference center and a hands-on academic/training facility for the students in Metro State’s hospitality and tourism program. The development will contain about 180 hotel rooms, 21,000 SF of meeting rooms, and another 21,000 SF or so of academic space. If everything goes as planned, design will continue into 2010, groundbreaking in 2011, and a grand opening in 2012. The project is slated for the southwest corner of Speer and Auraria Parkway at the northern end of Auraria’s Parking Lot R. Here’s a bird’s eye photo of the site from Bing maps:

The project team was also recently announced by Metro State. The hotel operator will be Denver’s own Sage Hospitality. The developer and general contractor is Mortenson, the architects are RNL and JG Johnson Architects, and Studio INSITE is the landscape architect. The project is an innovative public/private partnership. Funding for the academic parts of the project will come from money raised through a capital campaign by Metro State, with the developer responsible for funding the hotel portion. The project is estimated to cost about $40 million. While the Hotel Learning Center building has not yet been designed, a conceptual massing image on the project’s website shows the building could be in the 11-story range.

It’s very exciting that the Hotel Learning Center and the Student Success Building projects are able to move forward in these challenging economic times, with funding coming from sources other than the state’s dwindling general fund. From an urbanist perspective, these projects are equally exciting. It will take a while for Auraria to become a dense, mixed-use, urban campus that’s fully integrated into its Downtown setting, but these projects and Auraria’s new progressive campus master plan are all great steps in the right direction. Kudos to Metropolitan State College of Denver for their vision and determination to expand their presence, both academically and physically, in Downtown Denver.

Filed under Auraria, Education, Infill.

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Auraria Update: Metro State Student Success Building

Posted by Ken Schroeppel on December 18, 2009

Great things are happening at Downtown Denver’s Auraria Higher Education Center campus.

The Auraria campus was created in the 1970s as a commuter campus for three institutions: the University of Colorado Denver, the Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the Community College of Denver. Located across Speer Boulevard from the Central Business District, the campus has since grown to be Colorado’s largest, with over 40,000 students studying at Auraria.

Despite its prime location, the campus was originally designed to be isolated from the rest of Downtown with inward-facing buildings and broad lawns at its edges. Today, newly adopted Auraria Campus and Downtown Denver master plans embrace each other’s existence and set the stage for a bright future for the west side of Downtown. The new Auraria Science Building is wrapping up construction; its street-edge facade establishes a strong presence along Speer Boulevard that begins to bridge the gap, both spatially and psychologically, between the campus and Downtown.

Two new buildings are in Auraria’s near future. One of those buildings is Metro State’s proposed Student Success Building, the topic of this blog post.

The Student Success Building represents the first phase of the implementation of the new Metro State Neighborhood Master Plan. The plan builds upon the Auraria Campus Master Plan, which designates the Metro State “neighborhood” within the campus as the area between 9th and 7th Streets, south of Auraria Parkway, just west of the historic Tivoli and the Metro State Parking Facility completed in 2005. Here’s a bird’s eye image from Bing maps of the location:

The Metro State Neighborhood Plan envisions this area to include a total of six buildings: five major buildings and a smaller community/commercial building oriented around a landscaped quad. The following images are all from the Neighborhood Plan, prepared by studioINSITE, Sasaki, and Anderson Mason Dale:

The first building, the Metro State Student Success building, is a four-story, L-shaped structure planned for the corner of 9th Street and Auraria Parkway. The 143,000 square foot, LEED-Gold building will house the Registrar’s office, Financial Aid, Student Academic Success, New Student Orientation and other critical support services. The $62 million project is being financed through federal stimulus subsidized bonds, backed by a special assessment approved by Metro State students this past Spring 2009.

RNL Design has been selected as the architect for the building, which is scheduled to begin construction in 2010 and be completed by April 2012. While the design of the Student Success Building is still in progress, here are a few more images from the Neighborhood Plan showing the general massing and orientation of the Student Success Building and the future buildings in the Metro neighborhood:

I’m looking forward to the release of the building’s design by RNL and the start of construction next year. The new Student Success Building will not only serve as a gateway for the Auraria Campus to the north, but will also add a much-needed street wall to the Auraria Parkway edge of the campus.

Filed under Auraria, Education, Infill.

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Convention Center Embassy Suites Update

Posted by Ken Schroeppel on December 3, 2009

Construction of the 17-story Embassy Suites project at 14th and Stout in Downtown Denver is progressing slowly but steadily. In case you haven’t been past there recently, here are two photos I took a few weekends ago:

The photo on the right shows how the building is now up to the point where it splits into two sections with the gap in the middle for the glass atrium. Here’s a rendering showing the bottom few floors:

The developer has never bothered to share with the public a rendering of the full tower’s final design. I’ve sent them several requests but they have never responded. They also haven’t even bothered to post a project sign with a rendering on it at the site. Lame. Anyway, in that cool 14th Street video I posted about a month ago, if you look at it closely around the 1:25 minute mark you’ll see a 3D image of the completed Embassy Suites. A quick screen capture later, and here you go (click to double the size):

Let’s assume this is the final design.

The Embassy Suites website states only that the hotel will open in 2010. I’m guessing the 120-room hotel will open for business in September. What do you think?

Filed under Central Downtown, Hospitality, Infill.

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