When the Cherry Creek boom took off early last year, the Steele Creek Apartments project was the first large scale building to get off the ground. Since then, the 12-story, 250-unit building has topped out and is starting to shape up.
Here is both a street level perspective, taken from First Avenue and Steele Street, and an upper vantage point of the building. The blue glass facade has started to go in along with the brick on the east side of the building. The podium looks a little daunting at the moment however, there will be some treatment for the blank wall, as seen in the rendering.
The back side of the project was a little more difficult to see in the rendering. The 12-story building is accompanied by an 8-story building along First Avenue which shares the same facade materials as the taller portion of the project.
As you saw in our last update, Cherry Creek is densely filled with low and mid-rises. In that environment, even a 12-story building has a pretty large impact. Here is the project looking down Steele Street from around Virginia Avenue.
The Steele Creek Apartments will be complete in March 2015, making it the first large project to wrap up in the Cherry Creek neighborhood during this new wave of development.
I feel like CC is being overwhelmed with density, now. Too much. It might be okay if CC were actually served by light rail, but its not, but I know that I’m repeating myself on that topic.
I am so much happier with the glass color in real life than in the rendering. The dark/black glass really would have been out of place in our city, but the teal color should look really sharp under Denver’s sunlight.
I do hope they fix that podium though! I’m having trouble seeing how exactly this will work (are they going to put glass or something that resembles windows OVER the stone/stucco material that has already been applied to the garage facade?) but as always will hold off final opinions until it is finished.
I should add that, after looking at the original rendering, the podium “windows” appear to be inset into the facade. In order to pull this off at this point, they would need to veneer the entire surface with yet another covering (adding glass to the exterior would cause the “windows” to extrude from the facade rather than being inset into faux “window frames”). Unless they are planning to cut into what they have already applied, I’m getting the feeling that this design may have been changed.
I think it has been discussed on here or DenverUrbanism before, but the consensus is that critical mass needs to take place (i.e., gridlock) before people realize the need for a sustainable mass transit system.
I hope that the construction issues in CC this summer made at least a little impact on their thinking.
But I’m worried that RTD will continue to go the BRT route instead of light rail/street car.