Nothing records an era quite as reliably as architecture. History may lie, but buildings tell their own stories.
The point is driven home by two new photo books offering snapshots of Denver then and now. The slim, soft-covered “Denver’s Early Architecture” captures the city’s elegant building boom of roughly 1880 to 1920, when Denver was just joining the lineup of American metropolises, and builders aimed to show off its affluence to a growing populace and fresh class of tourists.
The other, “City by Design,” a glossy coffee-table book, spotlights in slick detail some of the best new projects to go up in the past decade or so, a time when builders sought to seal Denver’s identity as a player in a global, green-leaning village.
The thrilling take-away: What a difference a century makes, not just in technical advances and context, but in attitude.
A hundred years ago, the trend was to mimic the best of Europe past — Italy, Greece, France — and update the details for an era when new elevators allowed buildings to go higher and mass transportation let them spread farther. Today, the momentum comes from the desire of ambitious designers to woo clients with a functional respect for existing neighborhoods, an embrace of technology and a search for an identity that marries old sophistication with the new West.
The downside: Classicism is dead, or nearly. The designs that cling to columns and arches come across as halfhearted tokens, not authentic tributes to great days past. Instead, a newer, stripped-down form of internationalism rules, one that allows most of these buildings to look as much at home in Denver as they would in San Francisco, Abu Dhabi or Beijing.
This isn’t the case just in Denver but the illumination of architectural stylings for an entire country that has developed — for better or worse — a look of its own over the past 10 decades. Jazzed up by manifest destinies realized, world-war victories and economic dominance, and then tempered by the inhumanity of modernism and the silliness of post-modernism, building designers seem to have settled into a place of respect for both the planet and the past.
A century ago, we were copycats with the money to do it better. Today, we are confident, rational thinkers who have learned that red bricks can still make fine buildings (sometimes, and in moderation), luxury is second to purpose, and the best buildings mark their own time and thinking.
Getting specific
“Denver’s Early Architecture,” by James Bretz ($21.99, Arcadia Publishing), could make a preservationist out of the most hardened developer. What a great city Denver was when the money first flowed.
Just 121 small pages and containing little more than black-and-white photos and spotty captions with the most basic details of where, when and what materials were used, the book recalls the grand civic ambitions that lifted Denver above the grit.
Read it and weep about amazing once-were structures like the five- story Windsor Hotel at 18th and Larimer streets, built in 1879 and clad in lava stone and ornamental iron. Its 176 rooms were supplied with hot and cold water, an amenity luxurious enough to lure presidents as guests. It was torn down in 1959.
Architect E.P. Brink’s Albany Hotel at 17th and Stout streets was built in 1882 and featured two rarities, bay windows and electricity. Its lobby was full of marble, and its four dining rooms, some with murals and grand Corinthian columns, sat 500 guests. The hotel met the wrecking ball in 1976.
There were theaters both elegant and gaudy. The Tabor Grand Opera House, funded by Horace Tabor in 1881 and designed by brothers Willoughby and Frank E. Edbrooke, was partly constructed with exotic Japanese cherry and Honduran mahogany. It featured a giant rotunda and curved balconies, and capping the auditorium was a dome 30 feet wide. It came down in 1964.
Some are revelations, such as the quietly elegant L’Imperiale Hotel at 314 14th St., designed in a Tuscan style in 1892 by Charles H. Lee and Theodore Boal of sandstone and pressed brick. The book also inspires new respect for some structures that have stuck around, such as the Equitable Building on 17th Street, designed by the firm Andrews, Jacques and Rantoul in the Italian Renaissance style in 1892.
So many of the glorious shelters are gone, and the book names its villain for much of the destruction. The urban-renewal programs of the ’60s and ’70s ripped out Denver’s architectural soul in an effort to save it from urban decay and the danger that decrepit structures might fall on the heads of the few souls who remained downtown at a time when the affluent began to flee (before heading back in the ’80s and ’90s and driving up property values again).
It’s not all depressing. This tiny book makes it clear that cities ebb and flow, sleep and wake, and each era has its role.
What about now?
“City by Design” ($40, Panache Partners) is more of a promotional pamphlet than a scholarly publication. The book is partly funded by architectural firms and developers (and the city of Denver) who agreed to pay or trade services to have their works included.
It would be easy to dismiss it for that reason, but it would also be a mistake. Look beyond the lesser or outdated projects and catch a well-presented glimpse of what the city’s best firms are doing. The book’s pages contain an inventory thorough enough to deserve a permanent place on reference shelves, comprehensive enough to serve our grandchildren when they seek to understand this moment in time.
It also serves just as well as the history book that accompanies it to answer the questions that we ask every day: Who built that thing, and why?
The best and the brightest rise up. Some are obvious: Fentress Architects’ Colorado Convention Center, Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum.
And some, thanks in part to this book’s relentlessly impressive photography, are elevated to the list of important new works. Among them are Gensler’s Fillmore Place and the multifirm Clayton Lane, both instrumental in using clean lines and contemporary materials to transform the Cherry Creek North neighborhood from an area of mindless duplexes and stale storefronts to a relevant and inviting place to live and shop.
Indeed, transformation is what separates the standouts from the showoffs here. Oz Architecture’s Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library uses red bricks and a bold, flattened front to bring a contemporary polish to Five Points, Denver’s most organically beautiful neighborhood. The Stapleton housing project and the new medical buildings at the Fitzsimons campus in Aurora are making world-class districts out of fields of nothing.
There are surprises in the mix. The reflective fabric panels in the atrium of the Environmental Protection Agency Region 8 headquarters — energy-saving and energetic — bring respect to a building that looked ordinary from the outside; turns out it is not. And the design care afforded to the low-income or rehab housing projects like the Denver Housing Authority’s Block 3B downtown and the Highland neighborhood’s Juan Diego Apartments, both by Studio Completiva, bring to life a dream that society can help people and not make them feel self-conscious.
Are some of these firms bragging by buying a place in this book? Perhaps. But they’ve accomplished something here that we can all look at with some pride.
Denver’s architects are not leading the national pack; for the most part, the ideas in “City by Design” are contemporary, but they are not new. But the city’s designers come off as clever and likable, with grand civic visions present and egos in check. If you can say the same for the city as a whole, then that is a fine way to be remembered.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540 or rrinaldi@denverpost.com
