CREJ - Building Dialogue - September 2016
One Belleview Station breaks the mold in more ways than one. Slated for completion in late 2016, the 16-story, 320,000-square-foot, $90 million project is the first speculative office building in southeast Denver in nearly a decade. The building sets a high bar for office design. It’s an anchor for an ambitious infill development that seeks to bring an urban feel to a suburban location, and a model of efficiency in terms of not only energy, but money and space as well. The fixed budget was managed with target value design, the ratio of usable to unusable space is low, and the team is targeting LEED Gold certification, says Bruce Porter, vice president of business development for The Weitz Co., the general contractor on the design-build project. Not that the project didn’t need to clear any hurdles after groundbreaking in June 2015. “The construction prices from preconstruction to construction, the market pricing, went up pretty dramatically,” says Porter. How did Weitz keep the budget in check? “We also got our subs involved very early,” says ‘Porter. “It was a collaborative effort throughout the process. They knew what the target was. "The owner was very, very involved,” he says of Prime West’s Jim Neenan. “He was not hands-off.” The biggest challenge was “manpower concerns,” says Brendon Loveday, Weitz’s project manager for One Belleview Station. “It really comes down to communication. Everybody is spread really thin now.” And after a big lag in production, the labor pool needed a refill. “We were able to do it,” says Loveday. “It was a little bit of a challenge building that crew back up.” The space was managed like the money, with a keen eye on both the big picture and the little details. “It’s all sized appropriately,” says Loveday. “It’s a 30,000-square-foot plate with a Z configuration." Ribbed “precast picture frames” are a distinctive aesthetic detail, Loveday adds. “That’s an interesting detail,” he says. “It’s minor tweaks like that on a project like this that can really make the difference.” The design makes the most of the money spent. “We knew early on it was a fairly aggressive budget for the project,” says Jon Gambrill, managing director and principal at Gensler, who designed the project. “Some of the ornamentation you can put in the concrete costs money.” To get as much bang for the buck as possible, he adds, “One of our strategies on this one was to leverage the sun.” When it’s struck by direct sunlight, a distinct shadow accents One Belleview Station. “Every side of this building will benefit from sunlight,” says Gambrill. “As the sun tracks around the building, it activates the facade.” Another aesthetic goal: integrating the parking garage into the broader design. “We spent a fair amount of time trying to tie the parking garage to the building,” explains Gambrill. “It’s a seamless combination of uses.” At ground level, the goal is a human-scale environment. The base of One Belleview Station aligns with adjacent residential structures and has more architectural detail and what Gambrill describes as a “front porch,” an ideal space for a restaurant. The LEED Gold target gets an assist from a transit-oriented location, but there are many more sustainable features at One Belleview Station. “Early on, a lot of it was about the structure and working with Rocky Mountain Prestress to make it as efficient as it can be,” says Loveday, commending a number of subcontractors including MTech Mechanical, Greiner Electric and Metropolitan Glass on their work on the project. Gensler worked closely with Weitz from the beginning, and Gambrill describes it as a truly collaborative effort. “They were sitting at the table during the design process,” he says. The admiration is mutual. “Gensler’s a fantastic firm,” says Loveday. “They’re world-renowned. Weitz has a history working with Gensler and Prime West.” Porter says Weitz has worked on about 20 projects with Gensler. “They’re professionals,” he says. “They work well with the team, they understand pro formas and budgets, and work well within that. What you don’t want is to design something no one can afford.” Echoes Loveday: “They are most interested in adding value where you see it. They get it.” An unenclosed rooftop venue is one such perk, where you can see the value for miles and miles. “On a clear day,” says Porter, “you can see DIA.” The broader Belleview Station development includes eight city blocks (named A to H), and development is underway on three parcels. The 51-acre development is targeted to include more than 2.5 million square feet of office and retail space and 1,800 residential units. While Gambrill says downtown “is where a lot of millennials want to work,” he predicts the next trend will be transit-oriented developments like Belleview Station that offer “the opportunity to create that micro-urban environment that's a live/work/play area.” He adds, “I think these projects will start to work together. They're all going to play off each other around that Belleview Station light-rail stop.” Because multiple rail lines intersect at the station, Gambrill sees a lot of potential as “a pause point” and notes, “You’ll start to see more and more opportunities for higher-end retail and maybe a hotel.” “It seems to me it’s the new tech center,” says Loveday. “Out with the old, and in with the new.”