Architecture 101

First of all, my apologies to anyone on dial-up--more than one photo on this posting.

This morning I rode my bike around downtown, snapping pictures, and I want to share. Today's posting is probably what my co-worker and friend Jeffrey had in mind when he told me I should start a "Denver blog."

Every year about this time I finally start riding my bike after several months of staying indoors. I really don't like riding when it's cold out. Usually the first ride of the year isn't a long one--Ron and I do those 3-hour ones in the summer, going out to places like Cherry Creek State Park or Green Mountain. Instead, I just toodle around downtown.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always been fascinated by buildings under construction. I remember as a 5-year-old how interesting it was to watch the structural steel being assembled at the Catholic church down the block--I can't remember the name of the church, but it's at Federal and Vassar. All Saints, I think.

For several years there's been a massive new building under construction on the south side of downtown--a building designed by a big-name architect, a man with fancy glasses and a foreign accent. Not to mention pretensions--he's so sincere that not a few New Yorkers have grown tired of hearing about his plans for the World Trade Center site. The architect: Daniel Libeskind (and I don't know if I spelled that right). The Denver building: the new Hamilton Wing of the Denver Art Musuem:

They're finally removing the protective white wrapper to reveal the titanium underneath (I think that's what the cherry-picker is doing). The old Bach Wing is in the foreground, the original museum building constructed in the 1950s and remodelled in the mid-90s when they closed Acoma to traffic and built the plaza between the museum and the library.

People will either love or hate this thing. I won't decide until it's finally done.



Here's another view of it.

In this, you can see the glass bridge over 13th Avenue that connects the Hamilton Wing to what is now being referred to as the "North Building," the 1971 pile by Italian Modernist Gio Ponti. Say what you will about that building--I've always loved it, and always will. It's covered with several hundred thousand gray glass tiles that reflect sunsets beautifully.

Interestingly, on this site many decades ago was a Methodist church. Behind the church, facing 13th Avenue, was a separate building called the Evans Chapel. That's where my parents were married on August 31, 1942. Now it's a crazy titanium-covered art museum. The Evans Chapel was saved--it's now on the DU campus in southeast Denver.

And from this angle you can see all three parts of the museum, along with two scuptures--Lao Tsu by Mark di Suvero (the red steel thing), and on the roof of the Bach Wing, a work by Red Grooms, of which I don't remember the title. It's a cartoonish sculpture of cowboys and Indians, and it caused quite a stink when it was originally installed in Denver. Instead of an art museum roof, they had it on a little triangle of grass on Speer Boulevard--the little triangle next to the old Tramway Building at Arapahoe Street.


Of course, as interesting as I find the new museum wing, I don't think the museum necessarily did the right thing by not buying up the strip of buildings along Bannock Street between 13th and 12th. These are a motley lot of miscellaneous structures, and I think you'll agree they look rather odd juxtaposed with the Libeskind building, especially this earnest late 1970s passive-solar construction housing the Colorado Episcopal Foundation (note that they haven't finished peeling away the protective wrap on this side).

Already the new museum wing is causing property values in this neighborhood--given the name "The Golden Triangle" by city planners some time in the 1980s--to rise. I have a good feeling for the history of this area, bounded by Speer on the west, Colfax on the north, and Broadway on the east (I don't accept the Lincoln Street boundary put forth by the neighborhood association--for me, it's Broadway). I wrote a research paper on the history of the neighborhood when I was in Dr. Tom Noel's Colorado history class at UCD in the fall 1995 semester.

I won't repeat all of it here, except to summarize. The parts closer to downtown and furthest from Cherry Creek (the creek, not the neighborhood) were densely built-up in the 19th century. The creek, before walled-in by Mayor Speer in the early part of the last century, tended to have a fairly wide floodplain, so the areas closer to the creek were filled with housing for the working class. From about 1920 onward, the area declined, with most of the houses giving way to one-story commercial buildings devoted to either the sale or repair of the automobile. This was Denver's "garage," and at every intersection with Speer there was a gas station. Broadway was Denver's original automobile row.

There wasn't much left by the 1980s when city planners were trying to figure out a place to put a new convention center (in the 1960s the area was briefly considered for complete reconstruction as a home for Metro State College and what later became UCD--a fate that befell nearby Auraria instead). The 1990 Census showed something like 500 residents, and most of them were living in poverty (Broadway had a few transient hotels, and there were a few homes and row-houses left). After the city decided to put the new convention center in "The Silver Triangle" instead (a stupid designation--it's just part of downtown), the Golden Triangle became a new area of focus for redevelopment. The old Public Service Company (now Xcel Energy) bought up most of the southern end of the neighborhood, and made plans for a high density office/living complex. This never panned out--Denver's economy went into the toilet for several years, only coming back when massive public works projects like the new Convention Center and DIA injected billions of dollars of federal money into the regional economy.

So for most of the past 10 years the area has been redeveloping on its own, as a bedroom community. Some of this new development has been good--handsome neo-modernist structures--and some has been very bad indeed. Particularly egregious have been developer Craig Nassi's massive stucco-glop "Neo Central Park West" highrises, the Prado and the Belvedere, but there have been minor sins committed as well. I particularly detest the late-90s Mediterranean POS in the center of this photo, and while I would never wish anything bad to happen to anyone tasteless enough to buy one of the units in that building, I do have to laugh at what I see happening now: a series of six rowhouses going up next door, blocking the view from the southern windows on the first three or four floors.

In case you're unfamiliar with this vista, it's Cherokee Street between 11th and 12th. The building to the left of the ugly Mediterranean stucco mess is a Modern-Retro pile called "Century Lofts," one of the earliest new developments in the neighborhood.

Finally, I give you this:


It does something I particularly dislike: it fills up the entire block between Acoma, Bannock, 8th and 9th. It not only fills up the block, but thanks to a change in the route of Bannock Street that the city made in order to improve traffic, it bulges out into what used to be Bannock. It's a luxury apartment complex called "The Boulevard." Anyone who ever lived in Denver in the 1980s or 90s will remember this block as the former home of Racine's, a restaurant with so-so food and mediocre service that nevertheless was beloved by many. I myself had eaten at the old Racine's (they have since moved to Sherman Street, across from the KMGH-7 parking lot) many hundreds of times. In the late 80s and early 90s I spent every Monday night with a bunch of gay men at a support group, and we would invade Racine's en masse after 1o:00 for either nachos or desert (their nachos were massive, gut-busting monstrosities--I almost always went for the mocha ice cream pie).

But I have to say: I really, really hate this building, and not just because it destroyed a bit of Denver history (and I'd also point out that the old Racine's building had been built in the 1920s as a Ford dealership, and had lovely Spanish Colonial architecture). I can't stand the way it completely engulfs the block and I abhor the way the architect tried to break up its mass by using different kinds of brick in sections. And then there's the gimmicky faux-historicism, but this post is already too long.

More on new ugly architecture in a later post.....