Music Festivals can provide artists, designers, and architects a platform to present their work to large crowds. The sheer scale of these installations, the space for artistic exploration, and the vast audience they reach can give designers the opportunity of a lifetime to showcase their ideas. Through scale, color, imagery, and lighting, these installations create lasting impressions on the people who attend these events and those who see them through news coverage or social media. Some themes explored this year included reframing familiar things in unfamiliar ways, large-scale abstract geometries at the intersection of technology and art, and the use of innovative new materials.
The Coachella Valley Music Festival, an annual music and arts festival held in the Colorado desert, opened on April 14th, 2023. Over the two weekends, April 14–16 and April 21–23, 2023, four emerging designers and artists worldwide will leave their stamp on the famous landscape. The festival will feature art installations made by a total of nine international designers, artists, and collectives. The newly-commissioned sculptural works by Kumkum Fernando, Vincent Leroy, Güvenç Özel, and Maggie West lend color, light, and alternate perspectives to the charged atmosphere and act as fresh, colorful, and architectural beacons that transform the iconic Coachella landscape at various times of day and night.
Denver-based architecture office Tres Birds announced that Denver’s tallest mass timber building is planned to break ground in July 2023. The 12-story building named “Return to Form” will be located in the River North Arts District in Denver, US. Its structural system uses mass timber, a new technology that utilizes small-diameter trees from sustainably managed forests. Through continuous planting and responsible harvesting, these forests are becoming a source of renewable and low-impact building materials. The mass timber structure is comprised of wood panels that are glued and laminated together. This provides not only strength and stability but also fire resistance.
Hexton Gallery has announced the opening of “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Ephemeral Nature,” a curated exhibition that showcases never-seen-before works from Christo and Jeanne-Claude's private collection. The exhibition will feature an extensive selection of original drawings, collages, and wrapped objects from the couple's private collection, many of which have never been shown to the public until now. The gallery, in collaboration with the Aspen Institute and the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation have also launched a year-long program focused on the artists’ pioneering impact on environmental art, celebrating the 50th anniversary of their 1972 Valley Curtain project in Rifle, Colorado.
Rapt Studio has recently completed the new headquarters for VF Corporation in Denver, Colorado. With a mission to power active and sustainable lifestyles for the betterment of people and the planet, VF is a diverse collection of global brands. Their new ten-story headquarters brings together several of those brands under one roof, and at the same time, allows each of them to maintain individuality and expression.
Studio Gang and Denver-based real estate firm Urban Villages have revealed a new mixed-use, 13-story hotel in Denver, Colorado. The 145,000-sf building is called ‘Populus’ and will be located next to Civic Center Park. Opening to the city and the Rocky Mountains beyond, the hotel aims to become a new social center in downtown. On it's prominent corner site, the building was made to connect Denver’s civic, arts, and commercial districts.
Straddling the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the city of Boulder has become an iconic destination in Colorado. Widely known for its rock formations, the Flatirons, Boulder holds an innate connection to the mountains and surrounding landscape. Believed to have taken its name from Boulder Creek, the city has a rich history dating back to gold miners and the introduction of new railroad lines in 1873. Today, Boulder is a thriving center for education, art, and environmental stewardship.
A new 550-ton steel bridge has been placed next to the new United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs. The bridge was designed by the same team as the adjacent Olympic & Paralympic complex - Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Anderson Mason Dale, and KL&A - while taking inspiration from the motion of athletes. The design features a 250-foot curved steel structure that was made to float above the rail yard.
Lake|Flato and Shears Adkins Rockmore have broken ground on the University of Denver's new Burwell Center for Career Achievement. Designed as a campus hub for the university, the project was made to be a gathering place for the extended DU community. Sited at a key nexus between the campus's traditional core and its growing urban edge, the new 23,000 square foot center combines student career development with alumni engagement and programming.
The Olympic Museum and Hall of Fame (USOM) has broken ground in downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the 60,000-square-foot building will be dedicated to the celebration and education of “the Olympic and Paralympic athlete and the unique human spirit that creates Olympians,” displaying the artifacts, media, technology and stories of American athletes and the historical power of the Olympic Games.
LTL Architects (Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis) has been selected as the winner of the Telluride Transfer Warehouse competition, beating out finalist entries from NADAAA and Gluckman Tang. The competition sought schemes for the adaptive reuse and transformation of the National Historic Landmark-listed warehouse in Telluride, Colorado into “an architectural and cultural landmark that provides contemporary, public art space that deepens and expands the cultural life of Telluride.”
Telluride Arts has announced the three finalist firms that will compete for the adaptive reuse and transformation of the historic Telluride Transfer Warehouse in the arts district of Telluride, Colorado. Selected from an initial list of 30 firms from across the country, Gluckman-Tang, LTL and NADAAA were chosen as finalists based on “their sensitivity to the Telluride Arts and Telluride Historic Landmark Districts, their experience with historic restoration, and their previous design experience with public spaces for the arts.”
The three firms will now develop conceptual designs for the building, with the vision of “[creating] an architectural and cultural landmark in the heart of Telluride that provides contemporary, public art space that deepens and expands the cultural life of Telluride.”
Fort Collins, Colorado is a city on the rise, with a rapidly-growing population, a thriving local arts, music and craft brewing scene, and a stunning natural setting at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. But it has a problem: the BNSF railway has left behind a legacy that is a nuisance to many: a right-of-way that shares Mason Street, a major downtown route, with automobile, bicycle and pedestrian traffic. Diesel freight trains rumble down the street multiple times a day, causing traffic delays, safety concerns and prompting patrons at nearby sidewalk cafes to plug their ears in dismay.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro has released the first images of their design for the US Olympic Museum in Colorado Springs, close to the United States Olympic Committee headquarters. The firm was selected last October, collaborating with Denver practice Anderson Mason Dale Architects to design the $60 million museum which will host a hall of fame, a theater, and a 20,000-square-foot exhibit hall and retail space to showcase the history of the Olympic and Paralympic games.
Interactive: How Americans Get to Work. Image Courtesy of flowingdata.com
In the US, most people drive alone to work. This isn’t surprising, considering car culture has been a staple of American life since the end of World War II. However, with the potential of high speed rails making way in California and the push for public transit in many other states, it will be interesting to see how this map may (or may not) change over the next decade.
The US Olympic Museum committee has selected Diller, Scofidio + Renfro to design a $60 million museum in downtown Colorado Springs. The New York-based practice will collaborate with Anderson Mason Dale Architects of Denver and exhibit designer Gallagher & Associates to showcase the Olympic and Paralympic's history through exhibits and artifacts. Once complete by early 2018, the museum will include a hall of fame, theater, a 20,000-square-foot exhibit hall and retail space. Designs are expected to be released by mid-2015.
Screen shot from Cristobal Palma's documentation of Denver's Biennial of the Americas 2013 exhibition. Click the image to view.
The City of Denver has launched “Imagine 2020,” a pro-arts cultural plan that will pave the way for more city-wide “art opportunities” over the next seven years. According to the Denver Post, this initiative will include the revision of “plans, permits and codes” to allow for more installations, offer small micro-art grants for residents and neighborhoods, and establish large public gathering places throughout the city. You can learn more, here.
Seattle’s Olson Kundig Architects has been tapped to design The Kirkland’s new headquarters in downtown Denver, just a block from Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum and Allied Works’ Clyfford Still Museum. The commission, which is expected to cost “tens of millions,” will double the museum’s gallery space and be used to display Colorado’s largest repository of art that includes a collection of 15,000 objects by Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, Andy Warhol, Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe.
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