Engineering Center Renovation & Chimney Rock Visitor Center receive 2024 AIA Colorado Awards

Engineering Center North Wing Renovation

The design team developed a vision based on four key principles that guided renovation: introduce daylight, foster spontaneous interaction, create flexible labs for the future, and establish new workplace paradigms.

Although admired by many for its unique approach to the distinctive campus architectural vocabulary, the Engineering Center’s tired old spaces had become a liability for the campus and its dynamic engineering curriculum. In addition, the North Wing had served as a back door loading area while the evolution of campus placed it front and center as the focus of an important point of visitor arrival. The solution is a direct response to this context.

Like the rest of the Engineering Center, the North Wing is crafted of sandstone and concrete in an iconic mid-century re-interpretation of the Tuscan vernacular that dominates the campus. AMD crafted a more transparent north wall to present a welcoming community face for campus visitors.

Chimney Rock National Monument Visitor Center

The site is an important archaeological resource dating to the Pueblo II era (roughly 900 -1150 A.D.).  Chimney Rock National Monument is recognized as one of North America’s foremost archaeoastronomy resources, with native people believing the resource to be an important place of cultural continuity.

The Visitor Center features an arrival promenade, protected by a steel trellis structure, that serves as the gateway to the center. A stone wall seamlessly integrates with the trellis, guiding patrons towards a covered breezeway that leads to the interior spaces. This design element also acts as a visual guide, drawing visitors’ attention back to the forested meadow that forms the foreground of the National Monument. The breezeway opens into an outdoor room, enclosed by stone walls and a steel trellis structure, creating a dynamic interplay between indoor and outdoor spaces that enhances the sensory experience of the site.

The structure is a blend of functionality and sustainability. It comprises two volumes — a contact and retail station with office and storage space and a multipurpose space housing interpretive displays, including a multi-media space providing historical and orientation information on the site. This space orients toward the northwest to align a vista of Chimney and Companion Rocks for patrons. The building’s modest form and fragmentation of structure anticipates a distant future where the roof and infill wall may one day weather away, and vertical elements remain as artifacts on the land, allowing for the native landscape and wildlife to repurpose their presence.