A lot of progress has been made with this particular project since I last did a post on it in late May.
The facade is crawling up the office tower quickly and the circular structure is set on the top as well.
The 4-story portion of the building now has the structure up for the rotunda which adds a whole new breath of life in the project.
Here’s looking at the same portion of the project from the ground on the corner of 14th and Lincoln Street.
An overall front view of the project.
On to the Broadway side, you can see the facade on the 4-story portion is almost to the top.
They were installing some of the glass today. It catches the eye a lot more being broken up versus one solid pane of glass.
On to the back side of the office tower, the facade is almost complete and you can now see the name of the complex above the rear entrance.
In my post back in April I took a picture of this project off my balcony. It has grown and changed since then and it fits in very will with its surrounding neighbors.
I see this project every day when I get home and it is quite a treat to see such fast progress. I’m looking forward to seeing what it will look like once the glass starts crawling up. Also if you look very carefully in that last picture you can see that CenturyLink has begun to make their mark on the Denver skyline.
I wish the government planning agencies would recognize that part of the reason the Civic Center Park crime problem exists is because they’ve lined the park with buildings which are only used during the 9-5 work week.
If this same building was mostly residential with neighborhood-serving restaurants and retail in the ground floor, the park problem would be in much much better shape. If a few more residential buildings were added to the Golden Triangle (i.e. the two empty parcels on 12th and Acoma), the park would be much more active with people.
Do you know if there will be any parts of this building that are publicly accessible — as restaurant spaces, etc?
Ryan, I totally agree. I have said many times that if the public sector joined with the private sector to really focus on systematically densifying residential as close to the park as possible, we would eliminate a lot of the CC Park problems. Currently, the park lacks a natural neighborhood constituency of any significant numbers.
This is a totally random question, but…
Would the city of Denver ever consider purchasing land in the civic center area (Golden Triangle) and building city-owned rental apartments?
It seems like with the vacancy rate in Denver and the need for dense housing in the area, it would be a beneficial investment for the city. But I could be nuts too.
It’s certainly within the realm of the Denver Housing Authority or even DURA to do so I would think, but I doubt it would ever happen.
The office tower in the rear won’t be publicly accessible. The court building in front will have public components (law library, learning center, etc) but nothing of a commercial nature like a restaurant.
The models on the Fentress website show some of the strengths of the building that may not be evident in these photos.
for more construction ogling, the Denver Post recently published a photo essay including shots of the building from atop a 300 foot crane
http://photos.denverpost.com/mediacenter/2011/08/photos-cranes-over-denver