On DenverInfill, we have been covering the fate of Bell Tower and the two surface parking lots for 14 years. Yesterday, another rendition of the 375-foot tower went before the Lower Downtown Design Review Commission.
While there are two developable surface parking lots on the edge of Lower Downtown, the current submission calls for the development of one lot at 1300 Walnut. Below is an aerial we took for the 2019 rendition of the project showing the two surface lots. The surface parking lot closest to Speer Boulevard is what is planning to get developed at this time.
The project design has significantly changed over the years. Since the tower has come back, each rendition has been declined by the Lower Downtown Design Review Commission for various reasons; mostly relating to how it visually connects Lower Downtown to Auraria, and reflecting the historical context of Lower Downtown. The application submitted shows a comparison between the previous design and the present-day design.
At the conclusion of the meeting yesterday, the commission approved the application for mass, form, and context of the building. There was a lot of discussion about some design issues, however those will be address in the next round which focuses on the design details.
As you have probably already flipped through the application linked above, we do have new renderings pulled from the same document below. The architect on record is GDA Architects. A YouTube video was also submitted showing the design of the tower.
It’s exciting to see this project make its rounds through design review again. We will eagerly be keeping an eye out for the next round of design review for Bell Tower.
| Project Description | Developer | Architect | Contractor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 36 Stories | 139 apt homes | 197 (v) parking |
Kairoi Residential |
GDA Architects |
TBD |
Thanks for sharing the update. It is great to a parking turned into development!
The only thing that is disappointing is the limited relationship of the development with Cherry Creek. Having some retail and other development within the floodway should be something Denver explores. It only floods 1 day a year, prime retail next to Larimer square would give more character to the area and building.
Ha, Ha, that’s a good one. Nice joke. It’s a little late for an April fools joke, but still funny.
Yes, please. Was watching the national telecast of the Avs game yesterday. TNT must have hired a plane to do exterior shots of Ball Arena and each of these empty parcels were such an eyesore between downtown and the city’s central hub for sports entertainment. Hopefully all the new development plans for the parking lots to the south are now changing everyone’s perspective about what’s possible in these areas. Lots of dense housing is so badly needed.
Man, every surface lot in that part of town needs to be turned into skyscraping residential as soon as possible. The land value is through the roof, Denver’s in an eternal housing shortage, and post-COVID downtown is going to need boatloads of new residences if the nearby restaurants & retailers are going to survive. I really hope this (and other projects like it) gets built!
Looks nice. Id love to see a lot more condo construction downtown. I didn’t care for the previous “feather-like” design. It was too busy.
Oprah says, everyone gets a balcony! GDA has churned out some impressive post-Soviet architecture. https://www.gda-architects.com/gda-stoneleigh-tower.html
Friendly reminder, not every square block of a city has to be 10+ story residential towers. Great, historical cities have parks, promenades and town squares for people to gather and to host events.
Building Bell Tower will:
A) Jeopardize one of the very few gathering places in Denver, Larimer Square
B) Take away a potential public space and gift the profits to a Texas Developer.
Infilling these lots will never create walkability to Auraria, Speer is too wide, and people in LoDo have no reason to visit Auraria regularly.
Instead, these lots should be used to compliment and build on Larimer Square.
The eastern lot should become a flex space, with a sunken ice skating rink the the winter and a playground in the summer. We should add a couple permanent kiosks in each corner and additional access to the Cherry Creek trail.
The western lot should be converted to green space with trees to buffer Speer, or *gasp* stay as a surface lot.
We as a Denver community need to learn that not every flat space/lot in a city is created equal. We should prioritize infilling the completely inactivated spaces like NoDo (Broadway & Welton) first, BEFORE high potential lots like these.
HAHA This is such an uninformed comment from Clay V.
A) These lots are currently only gathering parked cars which is the #1 way to dissuade any public gathering at the human scale.
B) The developer has provided an exceptional amount of green space and even a new elevated path along the west side of the Cherry Creek, two incredible new amenities for tenants and Denver.
C) Great cities have DENSITY in the urban core which brings diversity of people and thoughts.
D) I don’t think there’s a more important lot in Denver to add significant residential scale. This site has the potential to add 500+ people directly to the LoDo neighborhood which will support all of the business along Larimer & LoDo. All while providing green space too!
Clay.. how does what you propose jive with a market economy? If you had money to invest, would you pay for the site and build an ice rink? Or would you build 139 homes that will return an average $2 million each? Besides, any “gathering place” bounded by busy streets is never a good idea. I’d rather have an extra 139 people/families supporting local businesses downtown.
I am well aware that Karoi likely paid a pretty penny for these parcels, and don’t blame them acting like a developer.
I do blame the city for ever zoning these parcels for anything more than 4 stories in the first place. This is truly LoDo, the separate HUED district is asinine.
I work in real estate, and I can assure you, national developers consistently laugh at Denver/Denverites for our lack of Design Standards or public awareness. We can’t blindly worship the oversimplified concept of “density” alone. It helps developers more than pedestrians…
Also, read more closely. The ice rink would not abut any busy roads (14th could periodically close like Larimer). However, having a 250 cars regularly empty onto Auraria Plwy/Market St is a bad idea…
Again – another incredibly uninformed comment from Clay V….
The east parcel is only zoned for 55 feet and will compliment Larimer St and LoDo very nicely. On the other hand, the west parcel is physically separated by the cherry creek river. As a result, this parcel should and is treated differently with unlimited height. These are intentional height & density limits implemented on both parcels by the LDHD and LDDRB that provide significant scale in the urban core while also respecting our historic past.
I agree that Denver lacks meaningful design standards across the city, but you are completely contradicting your own comments. This site IS being influenced (and will likely go through multiple iterations) by the design board / standards and trust me they are taking a LOT more into consideration than fantasy dreams of urban ice rinks.
Well, everyone else is laughing at height-NIMBYs for underutilizing prime downtown parcels so that some boutique in a 100-year-old building has an unobstructed view of a mountain range 40 miles away. That isn’t a “design standard”; it’s just an irrational argument for personal aesthetics, and that isn’t serving the housing needs of the community. I wish normal people had the bandwidth to counteract the outsized voice of real estate agents/developers/etc., so much of the rhetoric is so self-serving.
I liked the prior design better. It seemed bolder and dramatic. The revised design seems fussy and watered down. Still I don’t mind the revised version. I’m not betting any money that anything will happen on this site. Not after years of teasing and false starts with Gellers involvement.
Both of these tower designs belong in LA or Atlanta. Enjoy the thermal breaks at every. single. balcony. Hard pass. Needs more brick at the base and less floor to ceiling glass. I’d presume any solid color is going to be stucco and not metal panel, typ. developer move.
I have never understood why the State of Colorado and Auraria did not buy this block for UCD. Given the proximity to Auraria and to the downtown UCD presence in the business school and the architecture school, it would be logical that this be developed into student housing. I just don’t see this site as a luxury apartment or condo project, and it seems out of scale for this site, especially next to Larimer Square and Auraria to the west. My previous firm did studies on this site for just such a use, especially given that architecture students typically want to live in very close proximity to the school because they spend so much time there in their studios.
Why should the state give another handout to UCD when other schools with nowhere near the means of the state’s “flagship” school (let’s be honest, Mines should have that title) had to buy the land for new facilities on their own, i.e. MSU Denver and the athletic fields, art gallery, and music school?
If UCD had a need for the land they should have secured it themselves. It’s not as if the CU system is hard up for cash.
While I’m against the City design process potentially impacting the ability for this project to be built, I do think that the design standards will enhance this project to something the city & developer will be proud of for generations. The current design is basically Confluence Tower 2.0. This is such an important site for the city that deserves a lot of density and great design. Excited to see what GDA and Kairoi respond with! Fingers crossed that it will still be built one day!
The architecture school should move onto campus. It seems disconnected from college life and a bit embarrassing to have an architecture school in such a dismal building. Not one of Muchows best. Plus students shouldn’t have to cross Speer for classes. Seems unfair. Having said that. I don’t hate this design, and I don’t love it. It’s somewhat predictable, out of scale and chunky from certain angles. If your going to do something of this scale, on this site it needs to be kick-ass awesome….and it’s not. As for the notion that skyscrapers add density…well let’s think about that. Isn’t it that they suck the life out of the street? The city becomes a city of elevators and corridors, parking entrances and lobbies. A city that fosters inhospitable and uncomfortable human interaction. Residential towers like this are essentially gated communities. Isolated and Anti-urban. But I guess that’s just who we are as a society, can’t really blame the developer, they’re just cashing in on it.
Looks great. Build it.
I agree with the comments by Clay V (seems I am alone in that) and James on this one, and I got a good laugh out of “each rendition has been declined by the Lower Downtown Design Review Commission for various reasons…” Looking at the design offerings, the Lower Downtown Design Review Commission aren’t even trying. They’re just browsing the skyscraper aisle at Developers-R-Us. If they really want something that “reflect[s] the historical context of Lower Downtown,” they should lower their gaze.
The Fentress design of the Bell Tower from 2008 was bold and daring, if not necessarily beautiful. In fact, it reminds me of a White Walker’s horse from “A Game of Thrones,” but it certainly would have been an iconic building, and, 14 years later, I still remember the basic design from the renderings.
Instead, the current rendition is neither beautiful nor memorable; the slight variations from base to roof make it barely more interesting than a Chinese-style cookie-cutter apartment tower. Unlike the Confluence Tower, which should eventually feel integrated with River Mile, the Bell Tower will likely stand alone and prominently for a very long time, and I therefore wish the latest design were less forgettable.
Counterpoint: The design a *lot* of synergy with the nearby Four Seasons building.
Love to see this one get going…
Out of scale and uninspiring like The Confluence. It would look great in the DTC. I preferred the sleek, glassy design from 2019. But I’m all for adding more housing to downtown.
This project feels a bit Two Tabor in its ability to keep reappearing. What I’m curious about is how this building, if built, will look alongside the planned/proposed student housing at the parking lot on Larimer between E/W Speer and the other half of the Bell property as well. Having two taller buildings straddling a creek and a busy roadway on two very narrow lots does not sound like something that either the LoDo Design Commission or the City would ever sign off on.
Could look really neat when the rest of Auraria/Downtown campus plans are built out in/around the tower, but I’m not too optimistic that this ever gets off the ground.
Like the underway Populus project, this building stands alone (until other nearby high density buildings are constructed) which means the final design is going to be visually scrutinized by passerby(s) so I hope it fits the part aesthetically when signed off by the City.
Even if high density buildings are constructed nearby, this building would still dominate the view along Speer and would appear to be smack dab in the middle of Market Street when viewed northeast of 14th St (as pictured in the last image). While I accept jmpmk2’s point that it synergizes with the Four Seasons, that doesn’t help it look compelling, attractive, or iconic. I’m not trying to say that every place the downtown grid meets the cardinal grid (which produces the effect of a building appearing in the middle of the street from a distance) needs an iconic building, but this location is special. Due north is LoDo; northwest is Ball Arena & whatever will happen to its parking lots; southwest is Auraria; southeast is the performing arts and convention complex; due east is the CBD. That is a heck of a confluence, and deserves something that ties these districts together better than the current design.
Ryan,
Is it possible to create 3D future downtown skyline with all new proposed projects?
Yes! We are currently in talks with (other) Ryan about making this possible. 🙂