CREJ - Office Properties Quarterly - June 2016
Privately owned public plazas and pocket parks play a valuable role in the open-space fabric of our rapidly densifying urban core. Downtown Denver is undergoing the largest building renaissance in its history and almost all of that is privately funded and maintained. This influx of new workers, visitors and, most importantly, residents is putting a strain on the existing parks and public spaces. According the Outdoor Downtown Master Plan, an effort jointly led by the Downtown Denver Partnership and the Parks and Recreation Department, privately owned public spaces account for nearly 30 percent of all of the publicly accessible outdoor spaces in the downtown area. As more and more people inhabit the downtown environment, they will need places to sit, meet up, people watch, eat, walk their dogs and work outside. Much of this demand currently is being met and will continue to be met by the small urban spaces that are created at the base of new buildings or as part of a large private development. This is not a new idea in the history of dense urban cores like Manhattan, or in Denver, for that matter. In the early to mid-1900s, cities were working hard to ensure that access to open space and sunlight were maintained. Planning tools like density bonuses and step backs granted developers the ability to build higher if they provided public spaces at the base of their new towers. In the 1970s and ’80s, however, William H. Whyte shed new light onto what made these spaces actually successful. He found that spaces that engaged their surroundings and created comfortable human-focused environments with a diversity of program were used more than many of the stark, flat voids that were built. Some of these ideas defined the future of design of the interstitial urban spaces along with historical precedents, such as the famous Paley Park in Manhattan, which is largely considered one of the most successful of these typologies. In Denver, our urban renewal period of the 1970s and 1980s left us with a legacy of many of the same types of public spaces. The plazas and pocket parks at the base of our tallest buildings have been serving the residents and workers of downtown Denver since completion. The Cash Register Building, Seventeenth Street Plaza, the Tabor Center and the Capitol One Building all have these publically accessible spaces in some form or another. Some are notably more successful than others and some have been renovated once or twice, such as the World Trade Center Plaza (now Denver Energy Center). On a number of recent projects there has been a more focused effort on the part of private developers and their design teams to deliver vibrant, comfortable and unique spaces to the urban fabric of downtown Denver. Rather than thinking only about these spaces as a tool to achieve a higher floor-area ratio, these private developers are conceiving these spaces as an extension of the office, home or commercial environment that they are seeking to create. Projects like 1601 Wewatta or the Triangle Building have given a substantial addition to the public open space of their surrounding neighborhoods. These projects are far more than decoration at the base of a tall building; they are a marketing tool to potential tenants and a key piece of social infrastructure needed to create a lively city experience. Teams are starting to conceive spaces to play, to eat or to work outside that are catering to the new corporate office worker who may not necessarily want to sit behind his desk all day. These spaces are extensions of the office, offering places to host meetings, places to take a break and, most importantly, places to interact with fellow humans. Several new projects that will further this ideal is the Market Street Station, which is being designed, and 1144 Fifteenth Street, which is under construction and slated to open in 2018. The profession of landscape architecture is uniquely suited to help deliver creative, functional and beautiful solutions to these sorts of projects. Most, if not all, of the successfully designed urban spaces around downtown Denver used the skills of a landscape architect. Projects with this facet should engage the landscape architect in the early stages of the design process to ensure full coordination between the many constraints of working within and urban area. Site circulation, storm water, human comfort, retail location and signage are just some of the many factors that can either make or break these spaces. It is important for these spaces to become an integral part of the project and an integral part of the surrounding urban context.