The late Mary Voelz Chandler was a staunch advocate for Colorado architecture, using her decades-long post as a critic for the Rocky Mountain News to celebrate successful new projects and historic restorations — while simultaneously scolding designers and government planners when their efforts to shape a better built environment fell short. She told it like it was, but she also knew her stuff.
Before she died in 2023 at the age of 74, she churned out two exhaustive editions of the each more than 300 pages long, and both standing as definitive catalogues of the important buildings and landscape design that make up the urban geography.
As for applying all that knowledge to spell out exactly what might constitute a regional style of buildings, Chandler would have none of it. “There is no such thing, much as people might try to find one,” she wrote in the introduction to her final book.
Looking around, or maybe better-put, driving around this state of hills and highways, that statement is hard to disagree with.
What could possibly connect, from a visual standpoint, crucial Colorado structures as diverse as the Beaux Arts-inspired Denver Union Station, built with local stone and decorated with excessive nods to European classicism, to a more contemporary masterpiece, like the 2011 Clifford Still Museum, architect Brad Cloepfil’s stripped-down, concrete shell that serves as the perfectly palid backdrop for the abstract expressionists’ colorful paintings?
What link could there be between the sort of building that defines Denver’s early days as a metropolis — such the 1810 Denver Athletic Club, designed by Varian and Sterner, and like so many of its contemporaries surfaced with sandstone and red brick to give it an air of exclusivity for the upper class — and architect Shigeru Ban’s 2014 Aspen Art Museum, which uses glass walls, a cocktail-friendly roof deck and a playful, picnic basket-like exterior cladding to reinforce its transparency and openness to the public?
Itap easy to tick off a long list of important buildings in the state, and everyone has their favorites: visual icons such as the 1892 Equitable Building on 17th Street in Denver, designed by Andres, Jaques & Rantoul to echo the great edifices of Florence and Venice; or John Gaw Meem’s 1936 Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, which fuses Art Deco and Southwestern design elements into an art temple that is both elegant and highly original; or various houses of worship, such as Saint Catherine’s Chapel on the Rock in Allenspark, designed in a Romanesque Revival style by Jacques Benedict in 1934, which looks like it has risen up naturally out of the stony terrain that surrounds it.
Of course, there are more contemporary buildings that deserve a nod, including Charles Deaton’s whimsical 1963 Sculptured House in Genesee; Michael Graves’ shamelessly post-modern 1995 Denver Central Library; and Curt Fentress’s 1995 Denver International Airport, which accomplished the rare feat of becoming a symbol for the city.
And because it is hard not to call them out by name, buildings dreamed up by the most important figures in Colorado design history: Frank E. Edbrooke’s Brown Palace Hotel; Burnham Hoytap Red Rocks Amphitheatre; William Lang’s Victorian-inspired Castle Marne; Temple Hoyne Buell’s namesake Buell Theatre; and David Owen Tryba’s History Colorado Center, as well as his sparkling new Western Stock Show Association Legacy Building, which wraps more than a century of statewide architectural history into one contemporary showpiece of a building.
These objects might not have much in common stylistically, though each has accomplished one thing that unites them: They have managed to stand out in the stiff competition that is the Rocky Mountains. No architect builds successfully in this state — from Denver to Vail to Aspen to Boulder to Grand Junction — without understanding that those mountains are nearly always there in the background, framing every moment, influencing the way people look at them.
Itap a classic battle between man and nature, played out in the art form that is architecture, and letap face it, the mountains always win. Better to accept that fact and just do your best at creating good views, or at least not getting in the way of the ones that exist.
And good views, combined with progressive design, do characterize some of our best structures, including I.M. Pei’s 1961 headquarters for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder; Gio Ponti’s 1971 tower for the Denver Art Museum; and the state’s tallest building, the 1984 Republic Plaza in downtown Denver, by Skidmore Owings and Merrill.
That mountainous terrain has also inspired great structures in places where that might have been thought impossible.
“Coloradans have rarely recognized natural obstacles to development,” wrote the state’s most influential historian, Thomas J. Noel, in “Buildings of Colorado,” his comprehensive 1997 tome. “They have built in some of the most hostile environments, where gold, silver and other natural resources lie.”
A lavish opera house constructed in the rough hills of Central City in 1878? Another in Leadville at an altitude of 10,154 feet a year later? That is called staring down the enemy. Though it must be said, those builders had role models in the Pueblo people, rooted in what is now the state’s southwest corner, who carved out their famous Cliff Village six centuries earlier.
Maybe that is where the concept of a great Colorado building might begin to emerge, in that dare to build in a dry, rocky climate, mingled with an acceptance that the natural surroundings will always be a partner in how we understand our skylines, both high and humble. Some architects of the most successful buildings know there is no overshadowing those tall peaks or deep canyons, no escape from the aura and energy of the great forests and open plains that make life in the state so rewarding, that provide a sense of identity for 6 million residents.
Fentress understood that when he created the airport, with a faux-snow covered roof as an homage to the Rocky Mountains. More recently, Jeanne Gang and her design studio followed the same go-with-the-flow leanings in creating the 2024 Populous Hotel in Denver, which takes its exterior shape, audaciously, from the bark of an aspen tree.
Architect Walter Netch certainly got it when he designed the 1962 Cadet Chapel at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Instead of ignoring the mountainous backdrop, he used the view to his advantage, reinterpreting the nearby snowcapped peaks as pointy, abstract triangles and letting that form dominate his design. Itap Colorado’s best building, a work of modern art, populist yet groundbreaking.
Mary Voelz Chandler was right, sort of. There is no style that defines Colorado buildings, not a clear one at least. But if you trace it back holistically, from Mesa Verde through the Western Slope, and up and down the Front Range, you can see a common spirit, one that places humans respectfully in their earthly landscape, that looks back with gratitude, that moves forward the progress of the state and its people.
Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts and architecture.
