Historic Denver

Historic Denver's offices have moved.
We are now in the Tattered Cover Building
1628 16th Street, Suite 200
Denver, CO 80202
303-534-5288
Fax: 303-534-5296

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Historic Denver Guides
This series of books immerses readers in the rich history of Denver's buildings and neighborhoods, and gives them the tools to explore the city through entertaining walking tours.

Denver: The Modern City

Michael Paglia
Rodd L. Wheaton
Diane Wray

Photography by Jeff Padrick

Take a tour of downtown Denver's wealth of twentieth-century modern architecture.

ISBN 0-914248-23-5 $9.95

POST MODERN
TABOR CENTER
1672 LAWRENCE STREET AND 1200 17TH STREET
Built: 1985
Architects: Master plan, shops, and hotel by Urban Design Group with Anthony Pellechia and Lee Polisano; KPF (Kohn Pedersen Fox) with RNL, architects of record for office building

The Tabor Center is one of the city's finest examples of post modernism - due largely to the complex's distinctive profile and complicated surface treatments. Both of these characteristics represent a break with a fifty-year modernist tradition, in which designers preferred simple forms and surfaces.

The Tabor Center was conceived to bring new offices, a hotel, and retail to the lower end of the 16th Street Mall. The gentle curves of the hotel's convention center play against the glazed arc that forms the corner of the office tower. The whole is unified by a combination of yellow brick and precast concrete panels and green glass fenestration. Both buildings share historicizing features such as window detailing, pitched roofs, and the linking glass retail shed.

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