CREJ - Office Properties

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Page 20 — Office Properties Quarterly — January 2015
Design
T he Denver Art Museum’s new
administration building is one
of the most striking office
structures and interior spaces
anywhere in Colorado, yet
beauty was secondary to the pursuit
of something far more pragmatic for
Denver-based Roth Sheppard Archi-
tects. Tasked with
designing a building
that would catalyze
productivity, cre-
ativity and collabo-
ration while blend-
ing into Denver’s
iconic Civic Center
Cultural Campus,
the designers cre-
ated a jewel, both
inside and out, that
is also a highly pro-
ductive workplace.
Built by Saunders
Construction and completed in 2014,
the three-story, 50,000-square-foot
building on Bannock Street houses an
expansive space that heightens staff
collaboration while honoring the build-
ing’s surrounding architectural icons.
Located on Denver Art Museum prop-
erty (formerly used for staff parking)
directly west of the Daniel Libeskind-
designed Hamilton Building, and just
south of the AlliedWorks Architecture-
designed Clyfford Still Museum, the
building welcomes the museum’s 100-
plus employees, including administra-
tion, curators and others, and allows
for greater cross-campus interaction.
Today, its clean, modernist interior
spaces drive staff creativity and pro-
ductivity, while the structure’s nuanced
exterior quietly completes Denver’s
Cultural Complex. In addition to staff
offices and workspaces, the privately
funded $11.5 million project also con-
tains a research library for scholars and
collection storage.
In the beginning, the project present-
ed a number of interesting conceptual
challenges that required countless
meetings and untold design changes
on the part of Jeffrey Sheppard, AIA,
Roth Sheppard’s cofounder and design
principal, and project architect Tim
Politis, AIA. These challenges included:
• Design a building that is visually
compatible with the aesthetic diver-
gence of three surrounding iconic
museum buildings while maintaining a
sense of timeless elegance.
• Maximize useable square footage
while keeping the building’s overall
height below that of the Clyfford Still
Museum.
• Locate approximately 18,000 sf of
air-conditioned art and library storage
within the 50,000-sf building, with the
remainder allocated to about 100 staff
members, interns and support space.
• Provide flexible-use collaborative
meeting areas, workspaces and open
plan work environments (in lieu of typ-
ical fixed conference rooms and private
offices) that will allow all departments
to actively engage in critical work.
• Maximize interior daylight while
minimizing glare.
• Meet sustainable and LEED stan-
dards for energy efficiency, recycling
content and overall environmental
impact.
• Maximize shared-use storage and
“chance encounter” zones (versus
individualized storage and traditional
circulation systems).
• Design an interior environment that
visually speaks to the creative nature
of the staff, the work being accom-
plished and the museum’s art culture.
The end result, designed and con-
structed in less than a year, is a space
that offers a blank slate for the highly
creative processes that bring excep-
tional offerings to the citizens of Den-
ver and beyond. The building’s simple,
modernist workspaces and highly
flexible gathering places create a calm,
open and innovative environment
for staff to visualize, ideate and plan
upcoming events, curators to concep-
tualize new exhibitions, and historians
to conduct research in an efficient and
time-effective way. Centralized storage
within a second-floor wall art mosaic
of books and publications allows for
downsized individual workstations,
which encourages the use of desks as
work zones and not as storage or group
meeting spaces. As a result, staff moves
around the building throughout the day
creating more opportunities for collabo-
ration and synergistic encounters.
“We purposely designed the building
from the inside out to meet our stated
goals while challenging the traditional
‘central core’ office approach by locat-
ing the private, enclosed offices along
one wall,” said Sheppard. “This opened
up the building’s center, or heartbeat
zone, to become multiuse collaborative
areas for teams working on upcoming
events, shows, museum activities and
programs.”
Through the use of sliding, translucent
glass panels that can be repositioned to
create one large open space or divided
Cynthia Kemper
Principal,
Marketekture,
Denver
Workstations encourage the use of desks as work zones and not as storage or group meeting space.
The building was designed to encourage staff movement around the building, creating more opportunities for collaboration
and synergistic encounters.