"Denver's new Four Seasons missed an opportunity to be extraordinary.
Every new skyscraper is a miracle.
First, a developer has to conceive the project and then investors must buy into the dream. Designers have to sign on, conjuring a vision of how it might look, while government agencies must issue permits to move the plan forward. Then contractors need to locate materials and free up, at once, tons of heavy machinery. And finally, a brigade of men and women have to join the effort — masons, crane operators, carpenters — and get it done.
It is a series of miracles, really, especially in a bad economy.
Still, with all those checks and balances, it's hard to understand why no one, not the owners, the architects, the city or the neighborhood, saw what an opportunity the new 45-story Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences at 14th and Arapahoe streets could have been for Denver.
The new building is a massive and historic addition to the skyline — Denver's fourth-tallest building — and yet it is remarkably unremarkable. Beige and blocky, it's the sort of structure that you might simply not notice except that its size makes it impossible to miss.
That isn't to say that the swank interior space it frames won't be a swell addition to downtown. The Four Seasons, occupying the first 17 floors, has a stellar reputation and the hotel just might end up being the city's best inn. The 102 condominium residences, floors 18 and up, deserve a look from anybody dreaming of their own bird's nest downtown. One 6,100-square-foot unit recently sold for $10 million, the highest ever for a Denver condo.
With 239 finely finished guest quarters, a service-savvy restaurant, a luxery spa with "gemstone-themed" treatment rooms, and 17,000 square feet of party space, it is sure to become an upscale destination.
It's easy to like a place whose construction provided scores of jobs when no one else was building and which will employ hundreds permanently. Food on the table during a recession — another miracle.
But those fine attributes serve only the people on the inside: people with means, or at least the means to get invited or hired there. Most of us will experience the building from the outside, for decades, and we are fixed with an ordinary tower that rises sturdily, but with little grace.
We've seen this building before: the precast-concrete-and-glass monolith with impressive girth. It is grounded on the usual three-story plinth, then rises 21 more stories in an extrusion of concrete bands and tinted rectangular windows. From there up, the glass becomes more prominent. The four corners cut in, allowing for large, angled balconies.
There are some attempts to break it up at the top: a six-story plane of exterior glass on two sides and a very large and pointy spire.
What's missing: any sort of interesting exterior materials, the sleek steel, colorful glass or polished stone that make nearby structures stand out. Any kind of meaningful break in the planes along its four sides, which are simply a show of flat facades, save for those corner setbacks that fail to be truly shape-shifting. And any measure of flash or attitude; any nod to the architectural styles around it; any significant interaction with the sky or the mountains that form its backdrop.
It gets no better on the ground. No tall building downtown turns a colder shoulder to the street. For the most part, pedestrians on both 14th and Arapahoe streets are simply slammed with a flat and intimidating 45-story rise of concrete and dark glass from the sidewalk. There is no plaza, no stairs or awnings, and barely a view into the lobby during the day. There's not even a front door, until one ventures off to the side and into the cavelike, three-story block added on to the southwest side to make space for a carport.
The puzzling bottom is matched by another riddle at the top. Why a spire? It pushes the building toward the sky, which it desperately needs. But the sleek funnel is out of place on this rectangle. For such a point to be effective — say, with the Chrysler Building in New York, or San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid — a building has to take you there gradually, tapering in good measure from base to tip. Otherwise, it looks like a toothpick in a shish kebab.
The building appears overly influenced by what Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago architecture critic Blair Kamin has called the "spreadsheet syndrome," that values private amenities in residential towers over "architecture's public face." This is a building of stacked boxes, and those boxes are meant to sell.
It looks like what it is: The product of an out-of-town company designed by an out-of-town architecture firm, in this case Carney Logan Burke Architects of Jackson, Wyo. It is not influenced by a company's desire to create a corporate headquarters; it feels like just another outpost. It does not bear the mark of a design firm that wants a point of pride for its hometown — or who must live with its creation itself. It has little sense of place, and yet it occupies an enormously large portion of the place we all own and share together, Denver's skyline.
Out-of-town designers and corporations are welcome here, are desperately needed, in fact, to keep our city vibrant, our look and feel evolving, our economy pumping. But if they have an eye on our dollars, they should have ear to our image.
A $350 million investment in the skyline, on the edge of it especially, offers a chance to remake a city, to give it a more interesting outline, to move it into the future and even, if all things fall into place, serve it with a new icon that can be recognized near and far. That isn't a challenge for commerce as much as it is for artful urban design. But when the two come together, something powerful happens.
There are fine examples right in the neighborhood. The new 41-story Spire condominiums, two blocks away, play with color and alternating vertical planes; they integrate balconies into a complex, contemporary design. The 37-story Hyatt Regency Convention Center, another two blocks down, cuts a sleek and graceful profile across the sky; its engineering dazzles. Both buildings make Denver look alive — like the forward-thinking metropolis it can be.
This sort of success does not happen by accident. An architect must convince a client that looks matter; that an iconic building is actually good for business. A developer has to want to make history and yes, perhaps, spend a million more or make a million less in the name of creating something significant.
And city government has to use the power of its permits to apply pressure on developers to try harder; one can only imagine what might have happened if, say, at the very beginning of the process a deputy mayor asked for a meeting with, say, a hotel CEO, and suggested a more civic- minded design. Smaller cities, like Boulder, routinely work with developers so that additions improve the shared infrastructure.
Miracles do happen, and not so rarely. They just don't always happen when it counts." Ray Mark Rinaldi, 303-954-1540 or rrinaldi@denverpost.com, Posted: 10/24/2010 01:00:00 AM MDT (from (
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The height of the building is: 641' top of spire; 565' top of building