Southwest of downtown in the Lincoln Park neighborhood a trio of new commercial buildings are rising from the heavily industrial landscape.
Unlike the transformation that preceded it in the Central Platte Valley area to the north, these projects aren’t necessarily introducing new uses to the neighborhood. But they are bringing more density, modern design and — in one case — innovative sustainability features to Denver’s west side.
Earlier this month, Denver Water celebrated construction crews topping out the skeleton of a new six-story administration building being built near the intersection of West 12th Avenue and Shoshone Street. The $55 million building, part of a more than $201 million overhaul of the water utility’s Lincoln Park operations complex, is expected to be home base to 550 workers by the middle of next summer, Denver Water officials say.
It will replace an aging administration building tucked into the utility’s 36-acre complex, one of many structures on the campus found to have major functional deficiencies during an internal audit a few years back, according to Brian Good, Denver Water’s chief administrative officer. Leaders considered moving the administration building off the property Denver Water has occupied since the 1870s, but the notion was quickly dismissed.
“We’ll be more a part of the community now and a lot easier to find,” Good said as he surveyed the project and its surroundings. “You really sense the whole area is about to go through a major metamorphosis.”
The view from the future roof of the Denver Water tells the tale. Just a few blocks to the north, crews are busy installing windows at a five-story building that will be the new corporate headquarters for All Copy Products, a company that provides office equipment and technology services to other businesses. In a news release last year, All Copy Products president and CEO Brad Knepper touted features planned for the estimated $34 million project including “a golf simulator, pizza oven, full bar, 10 large screen televisions, shuffleboard table, and retractable glass walls that open to an outdoor deck.”
About a half mile from the Denver Water campus, the Denver Housing Authority is making progress on the 11-story building that will serve as its headquarters, as well as housing a fresh food market and co-working space just steps away from the light rail station at West 10th Avenue and Osage Street.
Authority spokeswoman Stella Madrid said that project, by the far the tallest building on the agency marquee Mariposa District property, is expected to completed in April.
“The density and mix of uses is critical to the neighborhood fabric that is now Mariposa and has been a continued vision made possible by our partners in the redevelopment thus far,” Madrid wrote in an email.
Mariposa has been held up as a national model for mixed-income housing projects, and, across the tracks, Denver Water has high hopes its administration building will serve as a national model for water conservation.
Tony Thornton is the senior project manager with Stantec, the architecture firm providing master planning and many other services for the Denver Water redevelopment. He said the 190,000-square-foot building will be on the cutting edge of energy and water conservation.
Thanks to solar panels on its roof and on neighboring parking areas, a narrow design that allows natural light to spill across each floor, a water-fed radiant heating and cooling system and other features, the building is expected to achieve net-zero energy use.
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It will feature an innovative water recycling system that will turn on-site waste water into water than can be pumped back into the buildings’ toilets or used for irrigation. One of the finishing touches of that system will be plain to see. Planters in the building’s lobby will help polish the recycled water, Thornton said, helping it use nearly 75 percent less water than a standard building of the same size.
“Denver Water really was pretty visionary with this,” Thornton said. “They really came at this from a viewpoint of environmental stewardship and their role in the community.”
