Skip to content
Archive of posts filed under the Architecture category.
« Older Entries

Buyer Found for Historic Hangar 61 in Stapleton

Posted by Jared on March 2, 2010
Hangar61-Pic

Hangar 61

It seems that a buyer may have been found for what is certainly the coolest remaining historic structure on the Stapleton redevelopment.

The Stapleton Fellowship Church has posted a blog announcing that its members have voted to move ahead with the purchase of the Hangar 61 building. According to the website, the Christian congregation has been eyeballing the the 9,000-square-foot structure, hyperbolic spaceship-looking shell of concrete and glass at 8800 East 21st Avenue more since December. Currently the church holds services a few hundred yards away at the Denver School of Science and Technology.

There is little that Hangar 61 is better suited for than an event space, with its streamlined roof arching like a clamshell toward an expansive wall of windows.  It’s hard to imagine that the building was ever intended as an airplane hanger. It’s even more impressive considering how deteriorated the structure was before state and local preservationists stepped in to save it.

Hangar 61 in 1959

Hangar 61 in 1959

In 2004, I remember sitting in on a meeting of the Denver Planning Board for a reason I can no longer remember. The subject of Hangar 61 came up on the agenda and this guy named David Walter stepped up to the microphone and started talking about why the building needed to be saved from demolition during the crusade to convert the old Stapleton Airport into an upscale, mixed-use dreamscape.  Walter is a local artist who co-founded Ironton Studios and Gallery. Walter described how Hangar 61 was built in 1959 by the Boettcher family-owned Ideal Cement Company to house its Fairchild F-27 turbo-prop airliner. The unique structure was designed by Fisher, Fisher, and Davis, and engineered by renowned concrete-shell engineer Milo Ketchum. Plus it just looked cool.

But it had also been vacant for more than a decade prior. It would cost hundreds-of-thousands of dollars to secure the 160-foot, diamond shape concrete arch (impressively engineered without center supports) and necessary environmental clean-up. Plus there was a complex tangle of ownership between the city and private development entities.

In 2004, Hangar 61 faced demolition

In 2004, Hangar 61 faced demolition

Board members voted to kick the issue to the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission. Eventually the statewide group Colorado Preservation, Inc. stepped up with a $200,000 grant to purchase the building and get the rehab process started. Then, last spring, developer Larry Nelson bought the building with the goal of taking it to market.

Nelson’s “620 Corp Inc. has spent about $1.3 million on the project, including constructing a parking lot and adding the frame for a new entryway,” arts critic Mary Voelz Chandler reported for the Rocky Mountain News in last January. “He estimates another $300,000 to $400,000 will be necessary to bring the hangar up to the point at which someone can lease or buy it to use as office space.”

I wasn’t able to get a hold of Nelson or the church, so no word yet on the sale price or if the deal has been finalized.

Filed under Architecture, Historic Preservation, Stapleton, Uncategorized, Urbanism.
5 Comments

#7: Downtown Denver Historic District

Posted by Ken on January 22, 2010

If pressed to name an historic district in Downtown Denver, I’d estimate that 98% of Denverites would cite Lower Downtown. In the 22 years since it was designated as an official Denver Historic District, LoDo has transcended from a seedy skid row of boarded-up buildings into one of the largest preserved Victorian-era commercial districts and coolest mixed-use neighborhoods in the country. Its fame is well-deserved. But less well known yet just as important is Downtown’s other historic district, the Downtown Denver Historic District, #7 in our countdown of Denver’s Top 10 Urbanism Achievements of the Aughts.

Unlike the Lower Downtown Historic District, which has relatively simple and straightforward boundaries, the Downtown Denver Historic District doesn’t really have any boundaries at all. The DDHD, designated by the city in 2000, consists of 43 buildings located on 18 different blocks throughout the Central Business District. About half of the DDHD’s buildings are also designated Denver Historic Landmark Structures, but the creation of the DDHD provides additional protection and control to ensure that these buildings will be around for a long, long time.

It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of the buildings in the DDHD to the integrity of Downtown Denver and to the soul of our city. Eleven of the buildings front the 16th Street Mall, and eleven more front 17th Street. These buildings are the core of Downtown. Their distinguished architecture, their impressive yet approachable scale, the craftsmanship and pride that went into them, gave credibility to a fledgling city back then, and give us today an understanding of our heritage as a city. Can you imagine Denver without the D&F Tower, the Brown Palace Hotel, or the Equitable Building? The fact that these buildings are scattered across a relative large area, from Tremont to Lawrence and 14th to 18th, means that you’re never more than a block or two from a building that serves as an historic anchor amid a sea of modernism and surface parking lots.

We lost a lot of great buildings during the second half of the 20th century, but the formation of the Downtown Denver Historic District in 2000 was a partial redemption and an important achievement in Denver’s evolving urbanism.

Filed under Architecture, Central Downtown, Historic Preservation, Upper Downtown.
3 Comments

Clyfford Still Museum Groundbreaking

Posted by Ken 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:

2009-12-29_csm_aerial 2009-12-29_csm_site

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.
5 Comments

Historic 17th Street Bank to Become Hotel

Posted by Ken 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):

Colorado National Bank at 17th & Champa 2009-12-24_cnb_birdseye

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

Inside the Colorado State Judicial Building

Posted by Ken on November 26, 2009

The Colorado State Judicial Building at 14th and Broadway, home to the Colorado Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, is part of the diverse collection of prominent buildings that constitute Denver’s historic Civic Center. The Judicial Building’s block also includes the wedge-shaped Colorado History Museum at 13th and Broadway.

As you probably know, the state is currently building a new history museum a block to the south at 12th and Broadway. This coming spring, the history museum will relocate to a temporary site and the state courts will move into the former Rocky Mountain News offices in the DNA Building across Civic Center Park. Once those moves are complete, the existing judicial building and history museum will be razed to make way for the construction of a new Colorado Justice Center that will occupy the entire block. The new justice center will include room for not only the state’s highest courts, but significant office space to accommodate the entire Attorney General’s office and all other Department of Law agencies. The new Colorado Justice Center will be finished in 2013.

The design of the new justice center is still in progress. While I have not seen any preliminary renderings yet, I can report that the new complex will likely consist of two components: a shorter structure facing the park for the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals courtrooms, law library, and court staff offices that will have a more dignified, formal presence worthy of one of the three branches of government; and a taller structure on the 13th Avenue side of the block for the Attorney General’s offices and other users that will have a more office-building look to it. How those two structures will be integrated (physically and/or architecturally) is still being worked out.

Anyway, since the existing judicial building will be demolished less than a year from now, I thought it would be appropriate to document some of the building’s more notable features and share those images with you. I have the good fortune to be friends with Colorado Supreme Court Justice Alex Martinez, who kindly provided an insider’s tour of the building for me and architect friend, Chris Shears.

The Colorado State Judicial Building, designed by RNL, was completed in 1977. The modernist structure features an inverted “U” design, with offices on floors two through four, the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals courtrooms on the fifth floor, and a law library in the basement.

Certainly one of the building’s most intriguing features is the space under the “U” which contains a skylight for the underground law library and a large mural by Angelo diBenedetto installed on the underside of the building above featuring representations of 60 persons who made outstanding contributions to the growth of justice and human rights.

Inside the law library, the space receives not only plenty of diffused sunlight, but also the occasional stares from onlookers through the skylight above.

On the fifth floor are the courtrooms for the state’s top two courts. The hallway between the two courtrooms feels like a corridor on the USS Enterprise. On the other hand, the grand doorway to the Supreme Court chamber evokes a warmer but still serious tone that, through its wood-carved sunburst motif, is reminiscent of something from a pre-Columbian civilization.

Inside the Supreme Court chamber, the modernist sunburst theme continues, with the courtroom’s amazing wood floor stealing the show. Standing at the podium is said to induce a dizzying effect. I immediately felt it when I stood in the spotlight for my imaginary address to the state’s highest court; the floor’s radiating pattern gave me a slight sensation like I was getting sucked into a vortex. Chris Shears and Justice Martinez seem unfazed.

The sunburst theme is also reflected in the beams in the ceiling as well as through the repeated use of the main door’s carved circular design in the decorative trim throughout the chamber. The courtroom also features two stained-glass windows honoring former Supreme Court justices.

Some of the more exceptional modernist elements from the Colorado State Judicial Building may hopefully survive and find their way into the new judicial center or into some other public place where they can be appreciated by future generations for the architectural era they represent.

I’ll be sad in a way to see the Colorado State Judicial Building go. It lasted barely 30 years. But Colorado has grown substantially in those 30 years and spatial, security, and technological needs require significantly more than the current building can provide. Hopefully, the new Colorado Justice Center will not only functionally serve our state for many decades to come, but also positively contribute to Denver’s architectural heritage.

Filed under Architecture, Civic Center, Government & Civic.
15 Comments

Top of the Clocktower

Posted by Ken on November 7, 2009

The other day I had the opportunity to be the guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Denver Independent Brokers group. Not only are they a noteworthy association of real estate professionals focused on the Downtown area, but they also have exceptional taste in selecting cool venues for their meetings, such as, say, the top of the D&F Tower.

The historic Daniels & Fisher tower is perhaps Denver’s most iconic historic structure, one that I’m sure you’ve all admired numerous times from vantage points throughout downtown:


Gaining access to the top of the 325-foot tall D&F Tower has not been an easy thing to do for many years. But now, thanks to Holly Kylberg, the top of the historic tower has been converted into a fabulous space for private events. The last stop on the elevator is the 17th floor, and from there on up to the 22nd floor, an internal stairwell connects six unique levels that feature the tower’s clock, the spiral staircase to the bell, and two levels with outdoor observation decks. First, the view:


Sweet, huh? Next, the interior is awesome. Check this out:


It was a thrill to get to the top of the D&F tower and hang out with the DIB folks. My thanks to John Robinson for the invitation.

So, the next time you’re looking for a one-of-a-kind Downtown space for a small private event, you should definitely consider the Clocktower.

Filed under Architecture, Central Downtown.
8 Comments

Uptown’s Park Avenue Lofts

Posted by Ken on November 2, 2009

The 194-unit Park Avenue Lofts apartments project covers the entire block bounded by 19th and 20th Avenues and Washington and Clarkson Streets. Under construction since early 2008 when it was named simply “Uptown Apartments,” the project has recently been completed and renters have moved in. Before this project arrived, the entire block was a weedy vacant lot–something that’s always a shame to see anywhere in the urban core, but particularly when that vacant lot sits at a corner along a prominent thoroughfare like Park Avenue.

Fortunately, we now have a handsome residential complex at that location. Along with the Post Uptown Square project and DHA’s Hope VI Park Avenue redevelopment, this part of Uptown is really filling in nicely. Here are a few pics of the finished product:

The building is pedestrian scaled and offers a straight-forward design with classical forms and details done in a clean, contemporary manner. The heavy use of brick gives the project a solid, grounded feel that should age well both architecturally and physically. A perfect background building for Denver and a fine addition to Uptown.

Filed under Architecture, Infill, Residential, Uptown.
6 Comments

Colorado History Center Design

Posted by Ken on October 12, 2009

I was out of town when these renderings were released and when the ceremonial groundbreaking was held a few weeks ago, but better late than never!

Here’s the new Colorado History Museum, now under construction at 12th and Broadway. Images courtesy of Tryba Architects and the Colorado Historical Society. As always, click on the image to view in full resolution:



For a description of the new Colorado History Center’s building program and other details, I’ll refer you to the excellent article on this topic by Westword’s Michael Paglia. He covered all the bases nicely.

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

Denver Justice Center Update

Posted by Ken on August 25, 2009

Denver’s $350 million new Justice Center is now in its final year of construction. The Detention Facility is supposed to open Spring 2010, and the Courthouse later that summer. With most of the exterior now complete, one can finally start to get a sense for how well the buildings fit in their place in the city and how they engage the emotions (or not).

First, some photos (thanks again to Vicki), starting with the Detention Facility. From left to right: northeast corner, northwest corner, southwest corner, southeast corner.

2009-08-25_jail1 2009-08-25_jail2 2009-08-25_jail3 2009-08-25_jail4

I’m picking up a slight Art Deco vibe from this building. Maybe it’s the exterior color and materials or something, but it sort of reminds me of an oversized modern second cousin to the Boulder County Courthouse. For a jail, and considering it’s not finished yet, I’m thinking this building may be OK.

Next, the Courthouse. From left to right: northeast corner, northwest corner, southwest corner, southeast corner.

2009-08-25_courthouse1 2009-08-25_courthouse2 2009-08-25_courthouse3 2009-08-25_courthouse4

To me, this building gives off little hints of International Style. I see similarities between this building and the base of the Wellington Webb building (both Tryba’s addition and the historic Annex portion along Colfax). I’m still not particularly fond of the glassy Jury Assembly Room that juts out into the plaza, but I do like overall the dramatic glass curtain wall on the main structure. I think both buildings will look quite nice in the evening, assuming the city plans to install appropriate accent lighting on each structure.

The plaza planned for in between these two buildings hasn’t been installed yet so it’s too early to pass judgement, but it seems to me that the buildings are too far apart from each other and that the plaza will feel a little too exposed, but we’ll see.

Filed under Architecture, Civic Center, Government & Civic, Infill, Urban Design.
35 Comments

Four Seasons Topping Off

Posted by Ken on August 6, 2009

A few weeks ago I speculated as to when the Four Seasons would get topped off with its 75-foot tall mast. I guessed September 5. I just learned that the mast will be installed in a big ceremony on Wednesday, August 19. Excellent!

EDIT – Wednesday, August 19:

I’ve learned that there was a delay in the fabrication of the mast so the topping-off will now occur in mid-September instead.

Filed under Architecture, Central Downtown.
18 Comments
« Older Entries