The Ralph Carr Judicial Center is already making an impact on the Civic Center skyline, and I like it. The architecture is classic Neoclassical, with marble columns and all. The state courts wanted a building that communicated a stately, civic presence on par with (and visually oriented towards) the State Capitol, and they are getting it. But despite the Ralph Carr’s architectural gravitas, I find its contemporary touches and generous fenestration (for this style) welcome features that give the building an inspiring, approachable quality. And it’s not even finished yet. Kudos to Denver’s Fentress Architects for designing a building that is clearly worthy to take its place at Denver’s hallowed ground, Civic Center. Our thanks to Trammell Crow and Mortenson Construction for the tour.

I like the exterior materials too. A light gray granite wraps the 4-story courthouse wing as well as the lower levels of the 12-story office tower, and pre-cast panels complete the upper floors of the tower. They work well together to give the complex a unified visual appearance, while exposing pedestrians to the high-quality material like granite we expect in important government buildings. Here’s a view (an inner courtyard along Broadway) of the vertical transition from granite to pre-cast panels. The darker-gray window glazing complements both materials. This wasn’t intentional, but I now notice the nice reflection in the window of perhaps Denver’s best light gray granite-clad modern building, Republic Plaza:

The office tower incorporates into both its north and south facades the columnar form, with vertical glass “columns” in between adding a modern gesture.

Before we we went up to the project’s upper floors, we saw a quick preview of Mortenson’s digital planroom technology. More on that in a future post. Then we took a ride in the construction elevator “cage” that climbs up the outside of the building:

From the 12th floor, here’s a nice view of the two courthouse domes: the smaller one in the foreground will be centered above the Colorado Supreme Court courtroom, and the larger one will cover the grand atrium. On the right, a stack of windows are being lifted up by a crane while traffic below on Broadway goes about its business:

From the Supreme Court’s fourth-floor atrium entrance, here’s the symbolic view looking back at the statehouse. Once all the scaffolding and temporary window supports are removed, this will appear as one big window offering one fantastic view of our state’s beautiful gold-domed Capitol.

Finally, while we now have real-life views of this project to observe, I recently ran across some additional renderings of the project I hadn’t seen before. They can be viewed here.

PS. If you don’t know who Ralph Carr is and why he is worthy of having a justice center named after him, please go here.

The construction barriers are down, new sidewalks and streetscaping are in place, landscaping has been planted, and the finishing touches are being applied. The main entrance on Broadway is impressive and welcoming. Wide stairs lead up to the front doors, creating a seamless transition from sidewalk to lobby. Zipping past the building in a car at 30 miles an hour, the building’s exterior can read as just plain beige. But inspecting the building up close for the first time, I was pleased at the warmth and the subtle variations of color and texture that meander throughout the beautiful limestone facade.

In Ryan’s Part 1, he included a photo of the lobby and its wood ceiling. The wood used there is beetle-kill pine, an appropriate material to use in a building dedicated to Colorado’s history, and a good local material to use in a building aiming for LEED-Gold certification. The floor of the lobby features a large COLORADO inlaid the terrazzo floor, which itself is rich and warm in color. The almost-golden hue of the interior finishes extends into the stairs as well, with Colorado sandstone walls.

The terrazzo floor continues into the grand atrium where, in the voluminous space above, a cool color palette and a more modernist feel prevails. The four-story glass wall facing 12th Avenue, and skylights above, flood the space in light. The building’s secondary entrance, reserved for large groups like school field trips, leads directly into the grand atrium from 12th Avenue, where a bus drop-off zone is located.

As Ryan mentioned, the top floor facing Broadway features a handsome function space, available for rent. Here, dark bamboo flooring contrasts nicely with the bright light coming in from the west-facing windows. A covered terrace extends this space outdoors, with sweeping views of the mountains and downtown skyline.

Overall, this is a fantastic building and I’m quite impressed. It features many beautiful (and durable) natural materials throughout, and manages to make its interior spaces feel spacious and intimate, modern and warm, at the same time. Congratulations to Tryba Architects for a job well done, and to Hensel Phelps and Trammell Crow for getting the building built on-time and on-budget. I know History Colorado (formerly the Colorado Historical Society) is eager to move into their new home and get it ready for a series of exhibit grand openings over the next year or two.

DenverInfill will be back to History Colorado Center later this year after the huge map of Colorado is installed on the atrium floor!

Finally, I’ll leave you with a time-lapse video, provided by History Colorado, of the building’s construction:

But, as usual, I’m here to talk about Union Station or, in this case, the Tulsa Union Depot.

I took this photo on January 10, 2011, a very cold day in Tulsa.  After the last train left this station in 1967, the building fell in disrepair to the extent that the roof collapsed.  Restoration was completed in 1983, and now the building is yet another fine example of Tulsa’s art deco architecture.  Unlike Denver’s Union Station, this one no longer has a place in the city’s transportation system.  It is an office building.  And it’s a beautiful office building.

If you were within a mile or two of Civic Center on Sunday morning, you probably heard a very loud bang at about 8:01 AM. That was the explosive “knock-down” (as opposed to an implosion) of what remained of the state’s 1970s modernist judicial building. Over the past month and a half, the Colorado Judicial Building had been undergoing a methodical deconstruction. Rather than ripping the building down outright, the building was “deskinned” of its light gray granite facade panels—part of the project’s recycling plan—which will be used within the new complex’s landscaped plaza areas. Much of the rest of building’s elements were also removed for recycling, leaving by Sunday morning a fragile shell of a building that was poised to be toppled by a few well-placed explosives. Even after Sunday’s explosion, much of the remaining rubble will be recycled.

Here are some DenverInfill photos that document the deconstruction of the Colorado Judicial Building.

July 5, 2010:

July 25, 2010:

Demolition Day minus 1 (that’d be Saturday):

The explosive knock-down Sunday morning, August 15, 2010 (courtesy of CBS 4 Denver):

The aftermath - later Sunday morning about 11:00 AM:

And finally, here’s the latest rendering view from the State Capitol (click/zoom to greatly embiggen) of the future Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Complex:

The Ralph L. Carr Judicial Complex is being funded through user fees backed by federal government stimulus bonds, and not through Colorado taxpayer dollars. The complex is scheduled to be completed in 2013.

The Museum recently released images of the final design of the building. The 30,000 SF minimalist-inspired structure, with its earth-toned concrete walls and horizontal massing, provides an appropriate and welcome counterpoint to its next-door neighbor, the titanium-clad crystalline-entity Hamilton Building of the Denver Art Museum. Here are a couple of photos:

Or, check out this video animation tour of the future museum:

Details about the new building are available at the Clyfford Still Museum website.

Good things are happening in Downtown Denver!

And then there’s FasTracks, another one of the most important, strategic decisions Denver has ever made.

Now we find ourselves at a point in time when these two monumental civic ventures come together. Denver International Airport, meet FasTracks. Curt Fentress, meet Santiago Calatrava.

This is the concept for the East Corridor FasTracks transit station at DIA, with a 500-room Westin Hotel on top and an extension of the airport terminal in between. What it also represents is a great step forward for our city and its infrastructure to a world-class level. Image this, along with what’s taking place at Union Station, as the gateways welcoming the world to Denver. Quite profound, if you ask me, and something that I’m happy and proud to support as a Denver citizen.

For more information, check out the cool video animation and all the details about the new South Terminal Redevelopment program at DIA at the airport website.

First, an aerial view looking north. Auraria Parkway is at the top and 9th Street is on the right. The L-shaped building encloses a pedestrian plaza (as always, click to enlarge):

View from the plaza:

View from across Auraria Parkway looking east:

View from across Auraria Parkway looking west:

View from 9th Street:

View from plaza entry:

The Metro Student Success building will be approximately 145,000 square feet in size and will hold the college’s 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 Spring 2009. The project is aiming for LEED Gold certification.

Construction of the Metro State Student Success Building is slated to begin as early as December of this year with a planned opening of April 2012.

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Do you live in a fast house or a slow home?  Do you know how to tell the difference?  Though everyone reacts to design intuitively, most people do not know how to interpret it, or understand how it affects them.  If you have felt allured by design but unable to understand its language, Slow Home has an antidote for you.  And it has arrived in Denver.

After observing “a lack of understanding about the fundamental problems of the housing industry and a disconnect between the understanding that professionals learn and what builders are doing in practice,” John Brown, a professor of architecture at the University of Calgary, started Slow Home.  He recognized the need to raise awareness about good design, and hoped to foster widespread understanding about the importance of good design.

Brown came up with the idea of a “slow home” during a conversation about the Slow Food movement with his sister, a chef. He found that the more he developed the analogy, the more it seemed appropriate to explain the current housing industry in North America.  “I started to tell my clients,” he says, “that houses in suburbia are the fast food of housing – all standardized and homogenized.”  In the same way that Slow Food considers the source of ingredients, their composition, and the act of preparing meals, Brown’s Slow Home Project intends to raise awareness about the sourcing of materials for homes, the decisions that go into the design of a home, and its workmanship.

So what does the project do? At is foundation is the Slow Home Test, which Brown describes as a tool that gives people a skill set through which to understand design and evaluate design quality.  Fourteen indicators are weighted to add up to a possible twenty points.  Points are earned in the categories, “the house in the world,” “the house as a whole,” and “room by room.” Continuing the analogy of Slow Homes to Slow Food, Brown says, “until we knew about trans fats, we didn’t have a language to talk about the problems they cause.”  The understanding of the language of design afforded by the test allows it to be a tool to influence consumers’ buying decisions and to understand what could be improved in one’s own house.  It allows consumers to be educated about how to “vote with their dollars.”

Next, Brown took Slow Home on tour.  This is where Denver comes in.  Brown recognized a “sizeable online community” at theslowhome.com, and decided to put it to work surveying design in nine large North American cities.  Denver follows Los Angeles, Toronto, and Dallas.  Members of the online community evaluate floor plans of new houses in each city using the Slow Home test, in order to create a data set about the quality of new home design in the cities.  So far, 2,100 homes, in the categories apartments/lofts, townhouses, and single-family detached homes, have been evaluated.

The preliminary results about Denver “are essentially an inversion of the results from other cities,” says Brown.  In the apartment/loft and townhouse categories, the percentage of plans meeting Slow Home’s minimum design quality standards is lower than in other cities.  But in the detached single-family home category, in which the percentage meeting the minimum standards – thirteen out of twenty points on the test – is generally the lowest, Denver’s results are higher than other cities.  More than forty percent of new single-family homes surveyed meet minimum design standards.  Eleven percent meet standards to be considered a “Slow Home,” which Brown says is an impressive fraction – to be considered a “Slow Home,” a home must earn seventeen of twenty possible points on the Slow Home Test.  It must be well designed inside, well located, and meet environmental standards.  Seven percent of single-family homes in Dallas were “Slow Homes,” and just three percent of those in Toronto.  And Miami? “Miami is just out to lunch,” says Brown.

Brown attributes Denver’s higher quality of design of single-family homes to a citywide interest in the environment and in community.  There are several urban renewal projects in the city that are doing well, he adds, including the redevelopments of Lowry and Stapleton.  Whereas “in other cities, all the new single family houses are way out in the suburbs where no one cares about them,” these projects in Denver are closer to the center of the city, and are under more scrutiny than new suburban projects.  Their design was considered more carefully, and in turn they score higher on the Slow Home test, shifting Denver’s results towards slowness.

Brown asserts that where we choose to live affects our lives.  To illustrate this point, he turns to an analogy about shoes: “wearing a pair of shoes that doesn’t fit is unpleasant – it makes your life harder, not better.”  In the same way, buying a house that has a “large unused front living room, a garage that blocks the whole front of the house so that there’s no natural sunlight, or that requires you to commute two hours each day” will not improve your quality of life.  Brown hopes that Slow Home’s design education tools will allow consumers to demand better design.  It values not expensive design, but simple, intuitive considerations by developers.  “People who understand design will refuse to buy a house without front entry closets, bedrooms with natural light, or a walkable neighborhood,” he says.

“There are people doing good work,” he continues; and with the right tools, “people will see the differences.  It’s not about telling people they’re living the wrong way, it’s about providing entertaining, educational tools to be a more informed consumer.”

Anyone can join the entertainment and education at theslowhome.com, where Brown posts daily video design exercises including analyzing and comparing floorplans and voting for the Slow Home awards for the surveyed cities.  The Slow Home awards for good new design in Denver are viewable at http://theslowhome.com/slow-home-project/denver-wrap-up/#comments.  WashPark Green, the winner for a single-family home, is pictured below.

You should know that I am not typically compelled to stop my car (I know – should have been using B-Cycle!) to take pictures of anything.  But I was so impressed with the relationship of 1800 Larimer to the street environment that I did just that.  Say what you will about the impact on the skyline, but the biggest social and psychological impact of almost any building on the general population is the way in which it engages the “floor” of the city.  I found 1800 Larimer to exhibit an elegant transparency and welcoming vibe at the building’s main entry – quite a feat considering the less-than-hospitable nature of the majority of buildings facing Larimer Street between 20th and 17th.  The new experience along this block was a pleasant and unexpected surprise.  Taken without the benefit of the sun, the pictures probably don’t do it justice – so I recommend that you get down to Larimer Street and experience it for yourself.

This year’s DOD features over 80 buildings and sites. Most are clustered in and around the Downtown area but several are located in neighborhoods throughout the city. Here’s a map of the locations, and if you go to the Doors Open Denver website, you’ll find the list of all the participating sites organized several ways.

Over thirty of the buildings have special Expert Tours that occur at specific times during the weekend. Since capacity is limited on these Expert Tours, on the day of the tour, you must first get a free registration pass at DOD headquarters at Union Station for the Expert Tour you’re interested in.  The free registration passes are given out on a first-come first-served basis. Since the Expert Tours “sell out” quickly, I strongly recommend you get to Union Station early in the morning (they open at 8:30 AM) to get your Expert Tour passes for that day. Otherwise, no registration is needed and you can simply show up to any participating building or site at any time between 10AM and 4PM, Saturday or Sunday, for a self-guided tour. A few of the sites have special hours, so please double check the list on the DOD website.

There are also a variety of other special events, such as self-guided Urban Adventure Tours, a photo contest, and activities for families and kids, such as Box City in the Wellington Webb building. I’ve served as a volunteer at Box City several times; check out my blog on the 2007 Box City. It’s a lot of fun.

Doors Open Denver is the perfect opportunity to explore Denver’s urban architecture by foot (or by bike or take Light Rail) and the weather this weekend looks pretty decent, so get out and celebrate Denver’s architectural and urban heritage this weekend at Doors Open Denver. I know I am.