Along the western edge of Denver’s downtown and historical LoDo district, Bell Tower fills an urban void that prioritizes pedestrian experience of the urban fabric in order to seam together an institutional campus, highly trafficked boulevard, and green space of an urban creek.

We designed the massing to craft a narrative between varied building heights and widths as well as the scale of Speer Boulevard. The site is somewhat insular situated between Cherry creek and Speer Boulevard, however the base design reinforces the scale and cadence found within the historic LoDo district while drawing pedestrians across the boulevard with appropriately scaled forms that rise and inwardly welcome pedestrians into. These forms then disperse across the triangular site where they relate to natural elements of Cherry Creek and pedestrian promenade, providing small opportunistic terraces. The tower portion then rises in the same manner as a series of extrusions of the lower base, creating a pinnacle like form.

The massing composition therefore echoes a mix of gridded urban structure and lyricism of natural landscape, capturing the dynamicism of the site and surrounding context.

As per the name of the tower, maintaining the view plane generated by the adjacent site of the original city hall bell contributes to the angled nature of the forms. Interior spaces become opportunistic within this aggregation of forms, between folds and layers, creating boutique like spaces in what would otherwise have been considered a scaleless tower. In addition to residential units, glass boxes are nested in areas of the building providing gathering spaces with extravagant views. Constraints such as a max floor plate of 7,500 further challenge and contribute to the form of the building, pushing and pulling as program and priorities change up and around the building.

Traditionally inspired yet modern to its core, the terracotta cladding modernly references the classic industrial nature of the historic LoDo area. The module of the panels exhibit a material that fits in one’s hand like brick, but with an exaggerated, contemporary linear dimension. The earthen tones also help echo the tectonic like massings. Where building program needs to carve the massing away yet maintain a building edge, the terracotta panels transition to a permeable screen to define that edge while still maintaining visual transparencies across the building.

With both urban and naturalistic contextually derived forms, opportunistic spaces, and modernly expressed historic materials, Bell Tower contributes to Denver’s urban edge as both a stitch and a gateway to adjacent areas, in ways that a building could only exist on that periphery and this site.