Q: How would you compare Denver to New York or any other of the great cities of the world?
A: I think of New York as a grand old lady, a beautiful, sophisticated, older woman. I think of Denver as a sometimes awkward adolescent. We have good bones, a great structure, and we’ve got great parenting, but we have gone through a period of rebellion in the last 50 years. Luckily we’ve kept our soul. That has been nurtured by the Downtown Denver Partners and our mayors: Wellington Webb did to a large degree, and Federico Peña really took up the challenge to rebuild the city.
It was that reinvestment in the public realm and the expression of who we are in built work – the airport, parks, cultural activities, preserving our neighborhoods – that put Denver’s historical core back.
Now the city is growing into an exciting young adult. There’s an incredibly bright future as we start to investigate the alternatives to the kind of destructive development we’ve embraced as a country over the last 50 years.
Q: Are you talking about urban renewal?
A: No, I’m referring to the suburbanization of America, and how destructive it has been to our natural resources and our way of life. In many ways it is dehumanizing to spend three hours every day commuting in your car versus spending it in a cafe, with your family or on the street.
Until the 1950s, we all took the streetcar. Bruce Rockwell, who was president of Colorado National Bank, told me he used to get on the streetcar with the janitor and they’d have a conversation on their way to work. Public transportation was the great equalizer.
Then the market was flooded with cheap cars and everyone started driving. It was more modern to be in your own car and by yourself.
Mayor Hickenlooper has led an historic movement away from that through his leadership in getting FasTracks passed. It will be a fundamental and major paradigm shift in our ability to grow up as a city.
Q: What do you bring to the table?
A: Having practiced architecture in one of the great cities of the world (New York) for a period of time, being a student of urbanism and having spent the first half of my career working in the public realm in Denver, our firm understands how government works here, and what the opportunities and challenges are. We’re finding ourselves working on a completely new scale, where in fact architecture transcends the notion of individual buildings and becomes city building.
You see the Gates redevelopment (at Interstate 25 and Broadway) and the Colorado Center at I-25 and Colorado Boulevard. In the center is light rail, so how do we build around that opportunity for an increasing number of people to get out of their cars once and for all?
In New York, it never occurred to me to buy a car because it was so much easier to get around by transit or walking.
Q: What do you drive now?
A: I just got a new car, so I don’t want to answer that question. It’s too embarrassing for me to think that I got a new car.
Q: It’s not an SUV, is it?
A: No, and it’s not a Hummer.
Q: Name one project you think most exemplifies what you do.
A: Clayton Lane in Cherry Creek North most represents what we’re doing to rebuild, regenerate. It was a parking lot on which we created increased density in a neighborhood that fought it desperately. Now it is the center of their community where everyone wants to be. The idea of Clayton Lane, with six or seven buildings, is more about the importance of the whole than the specific buildings.
Q: Why are we able to make so much happen in Denver now?
A: The happy confluence of demographics and economics. The baby boom generation is deciding where to place its money and where to live, and a significant percent want to live in an alternative to a suburban single-family house. They’re choosing a lifestyle that is more enriched by the public art, culture, recreation and an active life style that involves something more than mowing the lawn.
Q: You came through the University of Colorado’s Environmental Design School, but where are you from?
A: I grew up in Colorado Springs, then moved to Boulder in 1973. I worked in New York City before I started my firm in here in 1988.
Q: What did you learn there that has carried you over?
A: I learned about the city in New York, but I saw Denver as a place to come home to where everything wasn’t already done. Almost half the buildings in the central business district are one- or two-story structures that are noncontributing, parking lots or underutilized. That would suggest an incredible opportunity for regeneration and growth in the inner core.
Edited for space and clarity from an interview by staff writer Linda Castrone.
