Right next to the 21st and Welton Apartments, Alexan Aprapahoe Square is also making vertical progress. When we last visited this project, back in March, it was just starting to come out of the ground. As a refresher, Alexan Arapahoe Square is going to be a 13-story, 355-unit apartment building; head on over to this post for the latest rendering.
Now, let’s take a look at the progress. Alexan Arapahoe Square is currently five-stories up with eight more to go. Exterior work is also underway but there are no hints of the facade just yet.
Once the 21st and Welton Apartments and Alexan Arapahoe Square are complete, 22nd Street is going to have a tall, half block street wall.
Even at five-stories, this project is already having much more of an impact at the street level than a surface parking lot.
Holy crap, that’s a lot of surface lot there.
It’s not one of Kepharts worse designs, still, in going back to the renderings, I think people are responding negatively to the overall oppressive feel of it. This will never be a pleasant and gracious building to walk around. The main complaint is that it is too tall for area, but in a few years it won’t be. I suppose Denver zoning and design review doesn’t help much in that respect. I will reserve my full opinion on this building until it’s done. In the meantime I look at the rendering and see that something is amiss but have not quite figured it out yet….is it better then a parking lot? Yes, but that’s a pretty low bar.
I think it’s fine and fine as long as the rest of the infill around it doesn’t end up with the same massing. Denver might be cautious not to accidentally bulk up all its infill to be the same midrise height. Otherwise it could look like some dense Chinese sub urban center full of utility styled slave labor encampments.
I wonder if the plans for this project were already under way before the recent re-zoning of Arapaho Square to allow 20-30 story towers (with certain massing and other restrictions). Given the re-zoning, I’m cautiously optimistic that the rest of the area will end up developing into something more diverse than a sea of boilerplate 12-story land barge developments.