For the last few months, I’ve been attending meetings of the city’s Landmark Ordinance Task Force meetings. The meetings began last March, and are close to wrapping up. The goals are wide-ranging: updating the make-up of the Lower Downtown Design Review Board, probably extending the timeline for consideration of potentially landmarking a property, adding a …
Continue reading "Bringing ‘culturally significant’ buildings into the preservation fold"
Cities love to make plans. All kind of plans. Some get implemented, and others sit on a shelf. And as we recall, the best line ever about making plans was Daniel Burnham’s often-quoted “make no little plans.” Burnham and his co-author, Edward H. Bennett, were tapped in 1906 to create a plan for Chicago’s growth. …
Continue reading "Making plans for the future — and (we hope) the people"
Once upon a time, there was a booming manufacturing plant on South Broadway. But in the 1990s, much of the Gates rubber plant closed, and then Gates was sold to the British company Tomkins PLC for $1.1 billion. Since then, the redevelopmentof the massive site has gone through many twists and turns in a convoluted …
Many of us are already happily familiar with the online group Denver FUGLY. But how about something that could be Denver WIERDLY? This week, Architect Magazine online picked up a story that first ran in Builder. It’s about a homebuilder in Texas (but headquartered in Arizona) debuting a “new collection of homes that will allow …
Almost a year after the Denver Art Museum broke ground to begin major renovations of the Ponti-North-Martin Building, the museum’s deputy director, Andrea Fulton, briefed a city council committee on the project’s progress. In two words: a lot. Fulton showed members of the Business, Arts, Workforce, and Aviation Services Committee slides of renderings and photos …
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been traveling, for fun and for not-so-much-fun. As a result, a clump of emails has languished in my inbox waiting patiently for me to take a look. I finally took a look, and discovered a story that appeared in Curbed, a piece that kicks off the new year with …
Continue reading "The challenges of big cities — and Denver"
On Wednesday, I posted information from a meeting the night before where the city and the new owners asked residents what they would like to see from the redevelopment of the Loretto Heights Campus. But, the issue of preservation was not clear. Now, it is at least more clear. And that is thanks to District …
Continue reading "Take 2: Loretto Heights Campus … preservation"
Last night, I trudged into Machebeuf Hall on the Loretto Heights Campus along with about 220 other people. We were there to attend the first meeting organized by the City and County of Denver to give neighbors (and, really, anybody) who had concerns or ideas about what should happen to the campus with new owners. …
Much as I applaud The Denver Post’s series on our city’s loss of green space (or just plain open space) to rampant development, it’s now 2019. The horse is out of the barn. This series should have been published in, oh, say, 2015. There could have been a way for city leaders to slow things …
Continue reading "Development versus parks is not a good equation"
Last year, I bought a ticket from the Denver Architecture Foundation for a June 2018 tour of Evans School. Rob Eber, the person who led the tour and offered us a lot of wonderful information, is the son of one of the school's long-time owners, Richard and Alan Eber. The tour prompted many questions because …
Chandler in Denver 