‘Decoration instead of design’

A blog article by Michael Leccese, Executive Director, ULI Colorado
In response to ULI Colorado’s Design Forum on July 14th, 2016
Full audio recording and recap available here.

“Denver, you are not alone,” began John King, the visiting architecture critic from San Francisco Chronicle, launching ULI’s second design forum, “Does Denver’s Boom Spell Architectural Gloom,” on July 14 at the Denver Art Museum auditorium.

With 200+ in attendance, King reviewed lessons learned from his two-day tour of Denver’s more recent architecture and urban landscapes. In a blindfold test, he toured Civic Center, Golden Triangle, Cherry Creek, Lincoln Park, Lower Highlands, Berkeley, Chaffee Park, Brighton Boulevard, RiNo,  Downtown, South Platte Valley, and Union Station without knowing design team or developer credits.

ULI hosted the forum (in partnership with AIA Colorado and Historic Denver) with the goal of raising the design bar for new projects. The demand came from our members, who have opined that forces such as economics, high construction costs, watering-down design review processes, expedience and plain old bad taste are creating a contemporary city that does not match Denver’s past accomplishments or future aspirations.

In addition, the growing citizen opposition to new buildings could derail the city’s path toward infill and, ironically, cause further project delays that raise costs, further dumbing down design and construction quality.

King began his presentation with a slide showing lookalike apartment buildings in Denver and San Francisco, hence, “Denver, you are not alone.” He cited such common issues as “buildings that look like they were assembled out of a box of architectural wallpaper. So much new architecture is incoherent, arbitrary, decoration instead of design.”

“But there is no simple path to make a great city, a great place. Denver is one of two cities of any size to have form-based zoning, which CNU and others touted as the solutions to all ills.”

Promising to be fair, King spent about 30 minutes assessing Denver’s hits and misses. He noted that budget is often not the issue: some of the best buildings he cited were relatively inexpensive, such as the “landscraper” at TAXI and the affordable-for-low-income Aria Apartments.

He found a failure of form-based zoning in the “slot townhomes” prevalent in Berkeley and Highlands. Placed sideways on narrow city lots, slot homes maximize sellable units, but show blank walls and curb cuts to the street while looming over single-family neighbors.

King made several references to good design being a product of “simple emphatic rigor… that details matter… buildings should look like somebody cared.”

Mark Gelernter, Dean of CU Denver’s College of Architecture and Planning, moderated a response panel including Mark Falcone of Continuum Partners; Mark Johnson of Civitas; Susan Powers of Urban Ventures; Tobias Strohe of JNS; and city planner Todd Wenskoski.

Nuggets from their conversation:

Falcone: “Buildings are under-resourced [because of how they are financed]. We’re measuring financial performance over three years, not 20. Some 28-year-old equity investment analyst from Wharton is now my boss.”

Johnson: “We lack a shared aspiration. It used to be that a Mark Falcone would go to a Tobias Strohe and say, ‘Give me a good building that meets my budget.’ Now it’s ‘meet my budget and get my building approved.’

Powers: “I don’t recognize Jefferson Park anymore. We’re taking down block after block and not replacing them with anything better. Having watched the community design process at Aria and Mariposa, the outcome [there] is so much better.”

Wenskoski: “Architects need to spend more time in the streets to see how to be a good neighbor.”

Gelernter: “We’ve got too much ‘sketch-up architecture.’ …

So who decides what neighborhoods look like and what design quality is?”

Powers: “We’re at a point where many from our neighborhoods have already moved to Aurora. If we can’t figure out character and culture, we won’t know who we are in five years. I would advocate for a process to include a lot of people who are really pissed off right now.”

Falcone: “The market will take us in the right direction. It’s astounding how much the word has changed since 2010. Millennial expectations are so different with their tolerance for an informal, more expedient, vibrant aesthetic. I can build next to a junkyard because this generation has tolerance for new and diverse environments. The most dynamic cities will look more like those of the emerging world, like Mexico City and Sao Paulo. That’s why I’m so excited about LA: they’re already doing this.”

Strohe: “I see the positive aspects of form-based zoning. It helps a lot for mobility, walkability. But zoning and design review need to involve experts. We need professionals to be engaged and passionate.”

Johnson: “The human ecology of our city is moving quickly. When we try to regulate, we’re always behind, and it doesn’t work.”

In addition to our partners, ULI Colorado thanks event sponsors Page and R&R Engineering and LaDonna Baertlein and John Binder, co-chairs of the presenting Explorer series committee.