View of Poudre Garage looking west across downtown Fort Collins, to Horsetooth Mountain.

““They managed to design a brand new wing honoring the historic portion and its origin. We are truly pleased with how the project turned out. This building is not only an investment but it is also our personal office. It is a delight to work in such a beautiful space and we get compliments on it from clients all the time.””

— Tricia Diehl, Project Manager and co-owner

The Poudre Garage, a renovation and addition to an historic U.S. Forest Service garage building originally built in 1936-37, has received the Downtown Colorado Inc. (DCI) Governor’s Award for Downtown Excellence during a virtual conference event held last week.

The Governor’s Award recognizes exemplary commitment to the formation of projects which enhance and encourage the integrity and potential of an area. Winning projects positively impact the local community through commitment to the downtown, larger plan of the community, and overall culture and nature of the community where it resides.

[au]workshop are quite pleased that DCI recognized the extra effort that was taken to make the Poudre Garage a great addition to the street, the neighborhood and downtown Fort Collins.

We strove to make the addition compatible with the original building and context without imitating the existing materials and style.

The original building was built as a Forest Service supervisor’s warehouse, combining administrative and vehicle maintenance functions. As the building aged and USFS needs changed, it underwent a series of modifications. The art-deco garage doors were replaced with fixed glazing, and other openings were filled when the USFS converted the building to office uses, before selling the property in 1995. Various alterations made the building ineligible for the National Register, yet it retained the majority of its historic character and was designated a local landmark in 1997.

The Poudre Garage addition takes its design cues from the art-deco styling, existing massing, and materiality of the original building, carefully acknowledging its historic neighbors while optimizing a highly constrained urban infill site. A symmetrical art-deco-inspired design concept helps the addition remain compatible with the original garage, while using contemporary materials and detailing to avoid imitation and distinguish itself from the historic construction.

The project adds six loft-style apartment units to the site, increasing the neighborhood’s sense of security and walkability, and replaces existing surface parking with concealed spaces. The roof of the historic building is utilized as exterior living areas for the units, activating the building facade.

We worked closely with the client throughout the process, as the building was, and remains, the home of their business. The ground level interior was reconfigured for office and commercial uses, including the client’s offices, that activate the street. The exterior of the historic garage was also restored, with non-original storefront replaced with glazed garage-style doors that provide a hint of its former use, while increasing transparency and porosity.

The Poudre Garage also recently received a design Award of Distinction from the Colorado Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

You can see additional images at the project page, and view the awards submission here.

View along Remington street, with restored sconces and new overhead storefront doors visible.

For all the non-architects out there, a short explanation may be necessary. The design/construction schedule from our perspective is typically described in five stages (though there is some variation in how different architects mark their progress): 

1. Conceptual Design/Entitlements: Initial programming and conceptual layout, preliminary city approvals
2. Schematic Design (SD): Establishment of key relationships and functionality, early development of key design elements, early (and on-going) coordination with Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, and Structural engineering drawings
3. Design Development (DD): Early development of key details and further coordination with MEP/Structural drawings
4. Construction Documents (CDs): Production of documentation necessary to price and construct the project, including full coordination with MEP/Structural drawings
5. Construction Administration (CA): Continued coordination of documented elements with the construction process in the field

This whole process is also happening simultaneously within the interior design and landscape architecture disciplines, while also coordinating with the architectural team.

Whew! This is all to explain that the Mandarin Oriental Honolulu project is progressing according to schedule, with 100% SD (Schematic Design) having just been completed! We have updated our project page accordingly, with some brand new images and information. As part of developing the design, we've done extensive exploration and modeling in 3d, so we also wanted to share a quick video overview we produced. We're excited to move into Design Development as we begin the new year!

Presales for residential units in Confluence are currently underway, with nearly a third of the units already reserved! If you're interested in a residential unit or commercial space, please head over to the Confluence site to learn more before they're all gone!

Below is an example of the two interior finish options in the main living area. We have also added some new images at our project page, if you'd like to see more.

Confluence was featured prominently Sunday in the Business section of the Coloradoan, in a feature on buildings that are reshaping Fort Collins, alongside other projects that are revitalizing the River District. We've received lots of positive feedback on the article, so thank you! If you haven't read it yet, you can find it at the Coloradoan's website, or if you'd like more information on the project, check out our project page or go straight to the Confluence site. 

Presales are going on now, with units going fast!

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We are excited to announce that residential units in Confluence are now available for presale! More information about presales and the commercial spaces available for lease is available at the updated project website. We have also added a few new renderings to our project page. We will have additional information about the individual units (and additional images) in the coming weeks, so check back soon!

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We had the drone out for some context photos for Confluence and decided that it was such a nice day we'd put together a few quick shots of Block One...

Our daily commute during worksessions for our Bangkok projects (Emsphere and a few others), beginning at the hotel near the project site.

The traffic in the video is especially bad due to flooding during the rainy season, but it provides a good feel for the daily experience. 

Confluence has been featured on the cover of the Spring 2017 issue of Colorado Construction & Design. The AIA Colorado North spotlight lists the project alongside the Ginger and Baker rehabilitation of the Feeder Supply building (another River District redevelopment project), the Windsor Mill Redevelopment, and Bohn Farm Cohousing in Longmont. 

You can visit their website here or read the full issue here; the article is on page 33. For more information on Confluence, be sure to take a look at our project page and confluencefc.com.

Poudre Garage LLC hosted a ground-breaking ceremony Tuesday at the project site at Remington and Oak in Old Town Fort Collins. Renovations to the interior of the historic Forest Service garage have already begun, and work on footings and foundations for the addition is scheduled to begin shortly.

David Diehl, one of the company's principals, said a few words, thanking the Downtown Development Authority for their contribution to the project, which he indicated made a big impact in the quality of the exterior materials that the project budget could accommodate.

It has been a fun and productive collaboration with the owner, and we are excited to see the project beginning to be realized! More information about the project is available at our project page, and we will provide updates as soon as a leasing website is available.

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[au]workshop has designed a renovation for the historic Dairy Gold Creamery (located between Laporte and Howes Streets in Fort Collins) for a new coffee shop tenant. The building, a good local example of the Googie style of architecture, was carefully relocated slightly to the East in order to accommodate the new Utilities Administration Building, itself a collaboration between [au]workshop and RNL Design.

Out-of date mechanical and electrical systems, lack of accessibility compliance, and the absence of restrooms and other services, dictated a complete interior renovation, with the goal of making it a lively tenant space. Working closely with the City of Fort Collins, we developed a plan that houses a customer sales space and seating, a limited commercial kitchen and an accessible restroom all in an area less than 400 square feet. 

Perspective of exterior paint and new sign.

Office tour of work in progress!

Work is now beginning on the renovation itself, and construction is expected to take approximately a month, so we'll post another update when it is completed.

We are extremely excited to be able to announce another project that we've been hard at work on in Honolulu! We have begun having community meetings and are in the process of developing the project further with a potential hotel operator. 

From our project narrative: 

1500 Kapiolani Boulevard is located in urbanized Honolulu, along a tree-lined boulevard which links downtown with Waikiki. The site is within a recently designated transit oriented district, which raises the allowable FAR to 10.0 in order to increase walkability and discourage automobile dependency.

In this context, our client asked us to design an iconic 400 foot tower (the height ceiling) combining street-oriented retail, a four star hotel and complementary housing, with the goal of capitalizing on views over and around existing buildings in all directions. 

Our solution focuses on a simple massing and an iconic form befitting the prestige of Kapiolani Boulevard, distinctly visible from Kahnamoku Lagoon, the Ala Moana Mall, and other areas of the city.  We created two separate small-footprint towers—allowing the overall mass to be oriented Mauka-Makai (Mountains-to-Ocean as desired by island residents) preserving view corridors and breeze patterns. For residents, the two-tower scheme maximizes views and cross-ventilation, as well as value: all eight units per typical level are corner units.

The central design move was to maximize usable common and private open space and create actively programmed spaces on multiple datums, culminating in a lushly-landscaped sky garden bridge/platform for building residents at 350’ in the air, indexing the city’s previous height limit. This sky garden metaphorically replaces a ground level context lost when Oahu urbanized and reconnects the site to the horizon

Hawaii’s mild climate and pleasant breezes are woven into the scheme at every turn with the goal of dissolving the barrier between conditioned and exterior space. At higher floors, breezes are mitigated with appropriately placed massing. This is evident at the hotel floors which link the towers, creating a natural wind eddy at the podium, and at the sky garden, where building mass and landscape elements shield the gathering spaces.

Open space/green space is a central focus on vertical and horizontal surfaces in our solution. In fact, as shown in the image above, the cumulative horizontal intensive and extensive open space is nearly 2.3 times the site area and is complemented with additional vertical gardens on multiple surfaces.

This project is scheduled to begin construction in late 2017.

More information is available at the project's page.  We are hard at work continuing the design process and we will continue to post updates, so keep an eye on the blog!

We're excited! EmQuartier and the rest of the Em District have been featured in New Design Retail Thailand, an English-language compendium of "recently-completed high-end shopping mall[s], department store[s], hypermarkets, [...] from Li Zenn Publishing" 

The book contains some wonderful photographs and drawings of the projects. Check out a preview on Issuu, or order a copy on the publisher's website here for 1400.00 Baht (about $40). Don't forget to see our own EmQuartier page for more information. 

It's always nice to see our work out in the world!