SEPTEMBER 2016 \ BUILDING DIALOGUE \
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ne Belleview Station breaks the mold in more ways than one.
Slated for completion in late 2016, the 16-story, 320,000-square-foot, $90 million
project is the first speculative office building in southeast Denver in nearly a decade.
The building sets a high bar for office design. It’s an anchor for an ambitious infill
development that seeks to bring an urban feel to a suburban location, and a model
of efficiency in terms of not only energy, but money and space as well.
The fixed budget was managed with target value design, the ratio of usable to unusable space
is low, and the team is targeting LEED Gold certification, says Bruce Porter, vice president of
business development for The Weitz Co., the general contractor on the design-build project.
Not that the project didn’t need to clear any hurdles after groundbreaking in June 2015. “The
construction prices from preconstruction to construction, the market pricing, went up pretty
dramatically,” says Porter.
How did Weitz keep the budget in check? “We also got our subs involved very early,” says
‘Porter. “It was a collaborative effort throughout the process. They knew what the target was.
"The owner was very, very involved,” he says of Prime West’s Jim Neenan. “He was not
hands-off.”
The biggest challenge was “manpower concerns,” says Brendon Loveday, Weitz’s project
manager for One Belleview Station. “It really comes down to communication. Everybody is
spread really thin now.”
And after a big lag in production, the labor pool needed a refill. “We were able to do it,”
says Loveday. “It was a little bit of a challenge building that crew back up.”
The space was managed like the money, with a keen eye on both the big picture and
the little details. “It’s all sized appropriately,” says Loveday. “It’s a 30,000-square-foot plate
with a Z configuration."
Ribbed “precast picture frames” are a distinctive aesthetic detail, Loveday adds. “That’s
an interesting detail,” he says. “It’s minor tweaks like that on a project like this that can
really make the difference.”
The design makes the most of the money spent. “We knew early on it was a fairly
aggressive budget for the project,” says Jon Gambrill, managing director and principal
at Gensler, who designed the project. “Some of the ornamentation you can put in the
concrete costs money.” To get as much bang for the buck as possible, he adds, “One
of our strategies on this one was to leverage the sun.”
When it’s struck by direct sunlight, a distinct shadow accents One Belleview Sta-
tion. “Every side of this building will benefit from sunlight,” says Gambrill. “As the
sun tracks around the building, it activates the facade.”
Another aesthetic goal: integrating the parking garage into the broader design.
“We spent a fair amount of time trying to tie the parking garage to the building,”
explains Gambrill. “It’s a seamless combination of uses.”
At ground level, the goal is a human-scale environment. The base of One Bel-
leview Station aligns with adjacent residential structures and has more archi-
tectural detail and what Gambrill describes as a “front porch,” an ideal space
for a restaurant.
The LEED Gold target gets an assist from a transit-oriented location, but
there are many more sustainable features at One Belleview Station. “Early
on, a lot of it was about the structure and working with Rocky Mountain
Prestress to make it as efficient as it can be,” says Loveday, commending
a number of subcontractors including MTech Mechanical, Greiner Electric
WORDS:
Eric Peterson
PHOTOS:
Michelle Meunier Photography
