Auraria Update: Hotel & Hospitality Learning Center

Archive of posts filed under the Education category.

Auraria Update: Hotel & Hospitality Learning Center

Posted by Ken Schroeppel on December 16, 2010

The Metro State Hotel & Hospitality Learning Center on the Auraria Campus will break ground February 2011.

The proposed combination hotel/academic building is planned for the corner of Auraria Parkway and 12th Street where tennis courts are currently located. Here’s the site from Google Earth:

The hotel portion will be branded as a Marriott SpringHill Suites and will contain 150 rooms, a conference facility with a 350-person capacity, and a fast-casual restaurant franchise. The hotel will be managed by Denver’s Sage Hospitality. The academic portion will include over 21,000 square feet of classrooms, laboratories, and faculty offices for Metro State’s Hospitality, Tourism & Events program.

Here are three images of the project, courtesy of RNL Design:

View of the northeastern side. The intersection in the foreground is eastbound Auraria Parkway (wide street in front) and 12th Street (narrow street heading off to the left):

View of the southeastern side facing the athletic fields and Lawrence Street:

Internal courtyard:

If all goes as planned, the facility will open September 2012.

Filed under Auraria, Education, Hospitality, Infill.

11 Comments

Metro State Student Success Building Groundbreaking

Posted by Ken Schroeppel on December 1, 2010

December 3 is the date for the official groundbreaking for Metro State’s new Student Success Building on the Auraria Campus.

The new, 4-story, 145,000 square foot structure will be built at the corner of 9th Street and Auraria Parkway, and will represent the first building in the newly designated Metropolitan State College of Denver “neighborhood” within the larger Auraria Higher Education campus. Here’s a post from about a year ago showing the building’s site and its place within what will become the Metro State quad.

Metro State’s Student Success Building will serve as the home for the college’s new “one-stop-shop” registration center, the First Year Student Success Program, the Community Action Theater, the Center for Innovation, and other critical support, administrative, and student-support services. The $62 million project is being financed through federal stimulus subsidized bonds, backed by a special assessment approved by Metro State students in the Spring 2009.

The new building was designed by RNL Design of Denver. Here are the latest (and final, I believe) renderings of the new building. View is from the 9th Street and Auraria Parkway intersection looking southwest:

The new Student Success Building is scheduled to open April 2012.

Coming soon to DenverInfill… details on Metro State’s new Hospitality Learning Center, scheduled for groundbreaking February 2011.

Filed under Auraria, Education, Infill.

4 Comments

Metro State Student Success Building Design

Posted by Ken Schroeppel on May 24, 2010

Back in December 2009, I blogged about the new Student Success Building planned by the Metropolitan State College of Denver for the corner of 9th Street and Auraria Parkway on the Auraria Campus. At that time, only a few massing-model type renderings were available. Today I’m happy to publish our first look at the proposed design by architecture firm RNL Design and Saunders Construction. These images came from a schematic design submittal from April, so while they may not represent the building’s final design, they give us a good idea of the general look of the proposed structure.

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.

Filed under Architecture, Auraria, Education, Infill.

17 Comments

New CCD Building Proposed for Auraria

Posted by Ken Schroeppel on April 5, 2010

The Auraria Campus may add yet another prominent building along Speer Boulevard if Community College of Denver students vote next week to approve a special fee for the project.

Known as the Community College of Denver Student Learning and Success Building, the proposed structure at Champa and Speer would provide CCD with significant new classroom space and room for other academic and student programs that the institution is sorely lacking. CCD’s enrollment has skyrocketed to over 12,000 students, yet it continues to occupy just 10 classrooms in Auraria’s South Classroom Building. The institution is so pressed for space that it regularly uses theaters in the Starz FilmCenter at the Tivoli for classrooms and has even held classes outdoors.

The new project would join the list of a new generation of buildings for the Downtown campus. In 2005, the new Metro State Parking Facility at the corner of 9th and Auraria Parkway was completed. Then just late last year, the new Auraria Science Building became the first new Auraria building to be located right up against Speer Boulevard to provide a strong urban form along the campus edge with Downtown. Metro State has two proposed buildings in the works: the Metro State Student Success Building, a four-story, 143,000 SF structure slated for the other corner of 9th and Auraria Parkway that should hopefully break ground late 2010; and Metro’s Hotel Learning Center, an 11-story hotel/academic building for the college’s hospitality and tourism program that should start construction in 2011 at the corner of Speer and Auraria Parkway.

CCD’s new structure would occupy a highly visible site at Speer and Champa, just across Speer from the Colorado Convention Center. Currently, the triangular site is a surface parking lot. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the proposed location from Bing Maps:

The proposed building would range from five to seven stories in height and would cost approximately $50 million. The Community College of Denver would cover approximately one-half to three-quarters of the cost, with the balance covered by selling bonds that would be paid back with a special fee tacked on to CCD tuition for the next 15-25 years. CCD students will vote next week (April 12-16) on the fee increase for the project. If it passes, the new building could break ground in 2011 and be completed by 2013.

The project architect is Anderson Mason Dale, the same firm that designed the Auraria Science Building. Here are some preliminary images of the project:

From 13th and Champa (left) and St. Francis Way and 10th on the campus (right):

From Speer and Kalamath/Champa (left) and from near Speer and Stout by the Convention Center (right):

I captured these images from the video below, produced by CCD and available on their home page. The video does an exceptional job of making the case for the new building plus, in addition to the exterior shots above, the video also includes a number of nice renderings of the some of the interior spaces. I may be receiving higher quality versions of these images from CCD. If I do, I’ll swap these out for the better ones.

More news after the student referendum April 12-16. If this project happens, it will represent another important step in the transformation of the Auraria campus to a more urban complement to Downtown Denver… not to mention a critical improvement to the quality of CCD students’ education.

Filed under Architecture, Auraria, Education, Infill.

10 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.

Comments Off

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.

1 Comment

DenverInfill Blog

News and information about urban infill development in the Mile High City