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Archive of posts filed under the Infill category.

Union Station District Project Update: 20th & Chestnut

It seems everyone is anticipating the groundbreaking of the proposed 20th & Chestnut project by the Nichols Partnership in Downtown Denver’s booming Union Station district, which will not only give Downtown its first full-service grocery store, but also put that store within two blocks of the region’s largest multi-modal transit hub. Here’s a quick progress report on the project and two slightly updated renderings, courtesy of Nichols Partnership project manager Dan Schuetz.

The first image is a view of the project’s 20th and Chestnut corner; the second image, the 19th and Chestnut corner:

The development’s groundbreaking was rescheduled from March to June, due to some final tweaks to the building design. Now, the project’s entire ground floor will have 28-foot ceiling heights. The consequence of this is quite exciting. The interior ground-floor parking area reserved for grocery store customers will now feel much more spacious with a ceiling that high. Also—and this is the really cool part—with a 28-foot floor-to-ceiling height, this has allowed the Nichols Partnership to add an L-shaped mezzanine level to the grocery store, increasing the store’s overall size. Sweet!


Community College of Denver: Student Learning and Engagement Building Update

Back on January 12th, 2012 the Community College of Denver broke ground on their own Student Learning and Engagement building. This is a very similar idea to what Metro State did with their Student Success Center. This development will be a 4-story, 87,000 square foot building located on the corner of 7th Street and West Colfax Avenue.

Basic structure work is being completed. The elevator cores appear to be topped out. In the picture on the right you can see the steel that is lined up ready to be put in place on the building. Always a neat sight when a building is just getting off the ground.

 

None of the true building’s elements are showing but for only being three months in, quite the progress has been made. The rooms will also have a great view of the Denver skyline. Just from the ground you can see that there is a pretty unobstructed view.

 

This building is designed by OZ Architects as well as Boora Architects (renderings can be found by clicking the Boora link) with construction performed by G. H. Phipps. This will be home to Community College of Denver’s admissions, registration, financial aid, a testing center, the cashiers office, advising, and their own student success program. No details have been released about LEED certification but the college is being rewarded a $100,000 energy rebate for having ‘green’ elements such as chilled beams, radiant floors, and a green roof. They are expected to be completed with this project by summer session of 2013.


New Ballpark District Project: 2300 Walnut

From roughly the 1950s through the 1980s, when Downtown Denver’s skyline blossomed with skyscrapers, many property owners on the periphery of the Central Business District cleared their land of buildings to provide parking for all those new office workers and to have a “clean site” to entice developers to buy their land for the next high-rise project. This phenomenon occurred in the Golden Triangle, Uptown, Arapahoe Square, and Ballpark districts, leaving us with a four- to five-block wide “no man’s land” zone of surface parking lots separating Downtown from these adjacent urban neighborhoods. These rips in our city’s urban fabric are still evident today, but we have made great strides over the past two decades in knitting back together our city center districts with Downtown.

One area where that progress is quite obvious is along Market/Walnut Street through the Ballpark district, where 2300 Walnut by Mill Creek Residential Trust is ready to begin construction. Recent infill projects such as 2101 Market, Premier Lofts, 24 Walnut, and Ballpark Lofts have significantly helped transform the blocks along Market (which becomes Walnut Street past Park Avenue) from a sea of asphalt to a vibrant mixed-use corridor. But there was one big gap remaining: the full city block parking lot bounded by Park Avenue, Walnut, 24th Street, and Larimer. Now, thanks to Mill Creek’s 2300 Walnut project, that big hole in the urban fabric will be repaired. Here’s a GoogleEarth aerial where I’ve marked the project location (for all images, click/zoom to embiggen):

2300 Walnut is a 5-story, 310-unit apartment building wrapped around a 446-space parking garage. Here’s an axonometric perspective of the 24th/Larimer corner looking west back towards Lower Downtown:

The project features a multi-hued brick facade with an interior courtyard, a swimming pool and fitness center, and leasing office. Thanks to Scott Johnson and Marie McClellan at Mill Creek, here are two high-resolution project renderings. These are views of the Park Avenue/Walnut corner and the Walnut Street side of the project:

Mill Creek Residential Trust just closed on the property, so now they are ready to get the project underway. Utility relocations and other site work should begin soon, with full project construction by this summer. If all goes as planned, 2300 Walnut will open late 2013/early 2014.


New Union Station District Project: 16 Chestnut

Coming soon to a Millennium Bridge near you… 16 Chestnut!

16 Chestnut is East-West Partners‘ proposed office tower at 16th Street and Chestnut Place that will anchor the fourth and final corner to Denver’s Millennium Bridge.

Way back in 2000, when Denver’s Central Platte Valley was just beginning its transition from industrial wasteland to hip urban neighborhood, the Millennium Bridge’s dramatic 200-foot tall mast stood alone as a symbol of the area’s potential as Downtown’s newest urban district. Shortly thereafter, the Park Place and Promenade Lofts buildings joined the bridge as neighbors on its western corners, and now the DaVita building is wrapping up construction at the third corner. Once 16 Chestnut is built, the Millennium Bridge’s destiny as an iconic public space embraced by contemporary development will be complete. From an urban morphological perspective, the bridge will go from being the figure surrounded by open ground to being, in a way, the ground surrounded by many figures (that’s for my planner/architect geek friends!). Whatever your perspective, this is an exciting milestone for the Union Station area.

Here’s the scoop on 16 Chestnut:

It’s a 320,000 square foot, 18-story, 240-foot-high office tower located on the rectangular parcel bounded by 16th Street/Millennium Bridge, Chestnut Place, and 17th Street. The site is surrounded by the new Mall Shuttle loop at the Union Station light rail station. Here are two views of the site:

 

The development is currently in the concept design stage. Therefore, please note that all of the following images, provided courtesy of East-West Partners and their design partner klipp architecture, are very preliminary in nature and subject to change. Nevertheless, these renderings do give you a general sense of the mass and scale of the proposed building.

The general building program includes a level of underground parking, ground floor retail and entry, a second-level lobby that includes a cool walkway that spans across the mall shuttle lane and connects to the Millennium Bridge (a pedestrian bridge to a pedestrian bridge!), a few more levels of parking, and about a dozen or so floors of office space. Here’s a conceptual ground-floor site plan and building section/stacking plan—again, very much subject to change:

 

Finally, how about a couple of building concept renderings:

First, the view from 17th and Chestnut, showing the building’s unique helical parking garage ramps:

Next, the view from 16th and Chestnut, showing how the building spans across the Mall Shuttle lane plus the pedestrian connection to the Millennium Bridge:

East-West Partners is now actively marketing the building to prospective tenants, and the design will be refined as marketing efforts continue. More information on this exciting addition to Denver’s Union Station district will be forthcoming.


Downtown Denver: The Boom is Back (at least it seems that way)!

How many projects does it take before you can say your downtown’s experiencing a building boom? Five? Ten? Pick a number, but Downtown Denver is getting pretty darn close to that point. By my count, there are over twenty projects under construction or proposed in the Downtown Denver area. That’s pretty remarkable considering the severity of the Great Recession of 2008.

This time around, there aren’t too many high-rise towers being proposed (yet). Instead, it’s mostly mid-rise buildings, which is terrific news if you believe (and you should!) that great cities are comprised of a tight-knit fabric of pedestrian-friendly buildings that frame public spaces used for mobility, access, and social interaction. Nothing kills the cohesiveness of an urban environment more than a surface parking lot. Surface parking lots interrupt the continuity of the intensive human-oriented downtown environment and they suck the sense of character out of a place. They are a blight on the cityscape. Surface parking lots are, simply, the antithesis of what urban means. We have too many surface parking lots in and around Downtown Denver, but the good news is that over the past 20 years we have eliminated dozens of parking black-holes in the city center and, lucky for us, this current development boom happens to feature building forms that consume good-sized swaths of asphalt. At this stage in the progression of our city’s urban core, we’ll benefit substantially more from ten 5-story buildings than we would from one 50-story building.

Therefore, this is the first in a series of posts highlighting many of the new Downtown-area infill projects that I’ve been overdue in covering. Since January, my new job with the College of Architecture and Planning at UCD, where I teach full-time in the Master of Urban & Regional Planning program, has kept me exceptionally busy. But, with the Spring semester drawing to a close, now’s the time to catch up on what is really an amazing number of new development projects in central Denver.

So, let’s proceed… on with the infill!


A New Lincoln Street

Every once in a while I will walk against the grain on Lincoln Street on my way home from work. As I approached 14th Avenue I had to stop and stare at this amazing project in our Civic Center district. The Ralph Carr Judicial Center has a massive presence and changes the entire feel of the Lincoln Street / Broadway corridor. When you’re driving down the one way street towards the North, it’s hard to notice the boldness of this development but I encourage you, if you’re on foot, to walk against traffic on Lincoln Street and observe this project. From its Neoclassical architecture to some contemporary touches, what do you think of this overall development?

Not to mention, just down the street is the History Colorado Center which is another huge part of the new Lincoln / Broadway streetscape. Kudos to these two projects in making the gateway into downtown just that much better.

UPDATE: The hoist elevator has also come down on the office tower and they are starting to seal it up. This is a great step in the visual completion of this development.