CSU Center

Built Work
Project Architect / Design Lead

The CSU Center is the anchor project for Colorado State's new Denver campus located at the National Western Center. The building will integrate research, outreach and education into a single immersive environment, providing an interactive place for families, children, visitors and tourists to interact with and learn from cutting edge educators, researchers, and industry partners. The study of organizational ideas has been structured around a series of meetings with CSU Denver Leadership and the Design Team while the study of specific programs and areas has occurred with User Groups composed of representatives from each program department. The building will tell the story of modern agricultural innovation, will connect visitors with where their food comes from, and will teach the community how to safely grow, prepare and cook their own food and will celebrate and showcase unique opportunities for urban agriculture.  The CSU Center will be designed as one interconnected, interactive educational environment, where science, research, education and technology are on display, and shared broadly with the community.

The building features a rich diversity of food and agriculture programs and uses, composed within one immersive interior environment.  Primary uses include:

The building is organized around a multi-story interconnected interior gallery space, allowing the public realm of the building to showcase all of the unique and innovative science, technology and research initiatives hosted on site.

The CSU Center is situated at a primary gateway moment on the National Western Center Campus, at the intersection of Bettie Cram Drive (BCD) and National Western Drive (NWD), directly across the street from the South Entry to Grand Plaza.  Grand Plaza serves as NWC’s primary outdoor public space, hosting large volumes of pedestrian activity and traffic.  The CSU Center responds to the energy and scale of Grand Plaza by creating a generous public plaza space on the southern edge of Bettie Cram Drive, acting as a front porch for CSU’s Innovation Campus.  This plaza space is envisioned as a gathering space for visitors, creating an outdoor forecourt that begins to tell the story of food and agriculture to the casual passer-by.  The plaza will also support a broad range of flexible outdoor events hosted by CSU such as farmer’s markets, performances, and demonstrations.

The massing of the CSU Center building ascends towards this important intersection, creating a strong vertical marker, or beacon, on the corner to both mark arrival onto the CSU Innovation Campus and celebrate CSU as an important collaborative partner at the National Western Center.  The building’s Agricultural Discovery Center occupies this highly transparent, prominent corner element, celebrating the building’s educational mission and creating a unique identity for the building, rooted in food and agriculture. The building’s vertical postures culminates at a dramatic rooftop terrace space elevated to capture sweeping views across the entire NWC campus, westward towards the front range and southward toward the Denver skyline.

The building’s ground floor has been carefully programmed and configured, placing indoor agricultural growth facilities as well as community food and kitchen spaces on display along National Western Drive South to activate the pedestrian streetscape.  The primary lobby space anchors BCD and NWD on the site’s northwest corner, creating strong indoor-outdoor connectivity and transparency between the public plaza space and main lobby.

The architectural palette is inspired by and rooted in the patterns and tones of Colorado’s Agricultural landscape.  Materials anchoring the building to the ground draw on the rich color and texture of both agricultural soil profiles and crop landscapes. Highly textured, wheat and barley toned brick masonry and terra cotta panels ground the building and express agricultural patterns and tones.   As the building elevates vertically, inspiration is drawn from the highly technical and delicate structural forms found across today’s modern agricultural landscape, from center-pivot irrigation structures to urban agriculture greenhouses and drone fertilizing devices. Zinc wall panels express the precision and beauty of technological instruments found in modern agriculture and reinforce an identity of innovation. Elevated areas of glazing take on a subtly reflective quality to amplify the often rapidly changing weather patterns in Colorado and reinforce the strong connection between agriculture and weather.