DenverInfill Blog

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.

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.

This is depressing (from today’s Rocky Mountain News): State stuns Auraria, pulls $37.5 million for new science building

On a happier note, this past week DenverInfill world headquarters moved into new digs and the ‘puter is now back up and running, ending the weeklong blog drought! I just wish I had something happier to report.