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.
Well that’s great, no more tennis courts.. what else is Metro going to take?
Good point! First, the tennis courts, then, what’s next? Are they going to take away the baseball fields?! Metro State should check their priorities sometime! Simply outrageous!
Does anybody know if and where the tennis courts are being reconstructed?
David and Jason,
The Auraria master plan has the existing athletic fields/tennis courts area being redeveloped, but they purchased land south of Colfax to relocate the courts and fields to. I’m not sure what the timing is though.
The building is a bit of a yawn, I’m suprised with that prominent of a location, something a bit flashier could have been proposed? Does anyone know about the CUD building that students approved funding for across from Speer?
i totally concur with that statement
I’m a hospitality student at Metro and I’ve heard more about this building here than from the department itself… Thank god for DenverInfill! Unfortunately, this will probably be opening just in time for me to graduate.
As for the building being boring, have you seen the rest of this campus? This is practically the Taj Mahal compared to the other drab brick rectangles here. A flashier building might not be well received considering the budget cuts the school is facing. I know the funds are separate, but a really ornate building might be perceived as a bit of a slap in the face to other students when the school apparently can’t even afford to provide its students an effective wifi network.
Hmm…I’d rather they keep the courts and get rid of the parking lot next to them. Bury the lot under the building!
The building had to be relocated to the tennis court site after several major utility lines were discovered running under the parking lots. Relocating them would have been cost prohibitive enough to kill the entire project.
As for the tennis court relocation, they will be reconstructed in the near future along with an actual softball field (another Metro State project). But, there is a lot of other construction regarding the rerouting of the light rail lines that has to occur first. Expect to see more information come out in the next couple of years regarding the new athletic complex.
Considering that Metro State is building two new buildings in this era of such stellar state funding for higher education (which doesn’t factor in Metro State receiving the least funding per student of all of the schools while providing Colorado with the majority of college graduates who stay), I’m impressed. I tip my hat to the college leadership for getting both this project and the Student Success Building from vision to reality.
Also, the remainder of the parking lot that is unaffected by utilities (along Speer toward Larimer) is encumbered by the Bell Park view plane – which would have allowed for a building of about a story and a half.