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Page 20C —
COLORADO REAL ESTATE JOURNAL
— March 18-March 31, 2015
T
he Auraria Higher Education
Center (AHEC), home to
the University of Colorado
Denver, Metropolitan State University
of Denver and the Community
College of Denver, had been
historically disconnected from the
rest of Downtown Denver. The 2007
Downtown Area Plan called for fully
integrating the campus and Downtown
Denver core through improvements
to physical, social, economic and
programmatic connections. In
2013, the Connecting Auraria study
kicked off its examination of how
to improve the existing connections
between Auraria and the campus’s
surrounding neighborhoods, such as
the Commercial Core, LoDo, Golden
Triangle and La Alma/Lincoln Park.
Recently incremental improvements
have already been implemented, such
as the addition of a campus bike lane
on Curtis Street and planters and
banners along Larimer Street which
have already improved the pedestrian
environment along one of Auraria’s
most traveled pedestrian corridors.
$254,000,000 has been in
invested in new buildings at the
Auraria Campus since 2013 with
two projects that recently completed
construction. University of Colorado’s
Academic Building One, a 146,000
SF, $60 million project, was
completed in the summer of 2014
and now is the home to support
services and consolidated student
facilities. AHEC’s 5th Street Parking
Garage finished construction in 4th
quarter of 2014 and is a $20 million
project that provides the shared
campus with a 1,100 space, five
story parking structure with 15,000
square feet of ground floor retail.
Outside of the Auraria Campus,
the newest public project to be
announced was that the Kirkland
Museum of Fine & Decorative Arts
plans to leave its current facility in the
Capitol Hill neighborhood and move
into a new 19,000 square foot facility
adjacent to the Clyfford Still Museum
that will commence construction
in 2015. Another project that is
currently under construction is the
42,000 square foot, $15.8 million
expansion of the Children’s Museum
that will nearly double the size of the
facility when it opens later this year.
Image courtesy of Oz Architecture
The Children’s Museum, 42,000 square foot, $15.8 million expansion scheduled for completion in 2015.
Children’s Museum Expansion
Image courtesy of Olson Kundig Architects
Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Arts new 19,000 square foot facility planned for the Golden neighborhood scheduled to begin construction in 2015.
Kirkland Museum
PUBLIC PROJECTS