The Denver city and county building and the dimensions of planning: Fid-Bau Portal

The Denver city and county building and the dimensions of planning

Wilson, William H.

Denver's neoclassical City and County Building opened in 1932 only after major municipal battles involving the aesthetic, political and legal dimensions of city planning in the United States. The building now resting serenely on the tapis vertof the Denver Civic Centre, and closing its western vista, gives no hint of the struggles over neoclassicism versusmodernism, electoral and professional politics, and legal interpretation once swirling about it.

Mayor Robert W. Speer (1904–12, 1916–8) created the political atmosphere making the Civic Centre possible. For aesthetic advice over the years he relied on the sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, his own Art Commission, Edward H. Bennett, the successful architect‐planner, and others. By 1921 the original Civic Centre was complete except for the building planned to house the offices of the merged City and County of Denver.

The Centre followed the baroque pattern, with its axis stretching east‐to‐west, its cross axis running north‐to‐south. Beginning on the east at Grant Street, the grounds of the Colorado Capitol sloped two blocks to Lincoln Street, then another block to Broadway. On the crest of the hill, a mile above sea level, stood the Capitol, dressed in fussily detailed nineteenth‐century neo‐classicism. The Centre continued another two blocks past Broadway to Bannock Street. The existing municipal structures stood between Broadway and Bannock. On the south, the Colonnade of Civic Benefactors and the Greek Theatre marked one end of the cross axis. Fourteenth Avenue, the Centre's south boundary, swept around the colonnade and theatre in a deep, graceful curve.

At the north end of the cross axis, the newly completed Voorhies Memorial colonnade shimmered, its curving arms repeated in the arc of busy Colfax Avenue, the northern boundary street. The spare, neo‐classical Public Library, built before the Centre was created, occupied a spot just west of the cross axis, near the intersection of Colfax and Bannock. Unfortunately, its facade faced north toward Colfax and its partly undressed rear confronted the Centre greensward. On the block westward across Bannock, the projected site of the City‐County building, large Victorian houses rested beneath soaring trees (Figs 1 and 2).

From the west facade of the Colorado Capitol the view encompassed the Civic Centre, the sprawling city, and the Rocky Mountains on the horizon. A City‐County edifice fronting on Bannock would complete the Centre organizationally, by bringing together the local government offices, and aesthetically by closing the vista to the west. In 1921, the private University of Denver jeopardized the plan when it purchased the south two‐thirds of the block west of Bannock for the site of a school of commerce.