CREJ - Office Properties Quarterly - January 2015
The 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 Architects. Tasked with designing a building that would catalyze productivity, creativity and collaboration while blending into Denver’s iconic Civic Center Cultural Campus, the designers created a jewel, both inside and out, that is also a highly productive 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 building’s surrounding architectural icons. Located on Denver Art Museum property (formerly used for staff parking) directly west of the Daniel Libeskind designed Hamilton Building, and just south of the Allied Works Architecture designed Clyfford Still Museum, the building welcomes the museum’s 100- plus employees, including administration, curators and others, and allows for greater cross-campus interaction. Today, its clean, modernist interior spaces drive staff creativity and productivity, 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 contains a research library for scholars and collection storage. In the beginning, the project presented 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 divergence 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 typical 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 standards 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 accomplished and the museum’s art culture. The end result, designed and constructed in less than a year, is a space that offers a blank slate for the highly creative processes that bring exceptional offerings to the citizens of Denver 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 conceptualize 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 collaboration 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 locating 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 into two or four smaller meeting areas, a highly functional, yet flexible and collaborative space was created. The remaining walls are made of a tack-board material and/or erasable marker boards. “The heartbeat zone is surrounded by just a few interior private offices while significant open plan work areas around the building’s perimeter provide the interior with an overall feeling of expansiveness, thus promoting a collaborative and transparent work environment,” said Sheppard. The museum’s desire for greater departmental transparency, along with several other factors, also provided the basis for the intentional “blueness” of the interior color palette. A blue hue was selected because it establishes a timeless sense of calm while stimulating alertness relative to workers’ circadian rhythms. Research shows that the blue range within the color spectrum of natural light is prevalent during early daylight hours, thus brain activity can be enhanced by supplementing blue light as the day unfolds. For this reason, color-controlled blue LED lights – designed to increase in intensity as the day extends into evening (as natural light’s blue spectrum decreases) – were installed in the three-story atrium space. A raised roof with clerestory windows and a vertical three-story light well running the length of the building functions as the major vertical circulation to connect all departments and the research library. It draws daylight into the full depth of the interior. Directly on axis with the stair landings at each level are views into the collaborative heartbeat zone and staff break areas on the two upper floors. The research library, with individual work nodes for formal research, is also positioned adjacent to the light well. The museum’s research library uses a high-density mobile storage system to reduce its required size by 50 percent. The library also receives natural light from the three-story atrium while visually transforming the lower level into a dynamic research environment with workstations and a large inset curved lounge area under the stair landing. “Our new building’s open floor plan provides team members with optimal working and meeting spaces to inspire creativity and capitalize on the amazing talent we have at the museum,” said Cathey McClain Finlon, a member of the Denver Art Museum’s board of trustees and a leader on the project. “We also expect it to add new foot traffic throughout the Golden Triangle neighborhood, generating positive economic impact to the area.” Beyond the building’s front entrance on Bannock Street, museum patrons are welcomed into the “culture” of the art world. Here the administrative departments and staff connect to the institution’s broader vision via an open, integrated office environment with views of the Hamilton and North Buildings to the east. The main entrance, as well as a dedicated staff entrance on the east side of the building, converge at the three-story atrium and vertical circulation zone, symbolically and physically offering everyone the same experience as they enter and move through the building. “The new office building unites our campus and infuses the Golden Triangle neighborhood with the energy of more than 100 creative people,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer director of the Denver Art Museum “The full spectrum of museum employees is now inspired by our world-class collections, eating lunch together and working in a space that encourages cross-campus collaboration.