Photo by Joel Eden Photography

The first few months of classes at the Denver School of the Arts were complete in December, and the reviews for the new school have been good.

"This is the showcase of the current DPS bond cycle. It's so successful that it's being referred to as a 'national school for the arts,'" said DRG Construction Vice President Diedra Garcia. Her firm, in a joint venture with Taylor Kohrs, served as construction manager/general contractor on the project, which was designed by Denver's Klipp, working with Semple Brown Design.

"This would be the jewel of almost any school district, and it's one of only five schools of its kind in the country," said Scott Kohrs, president of Taylor Kohrs.

The DSA is a combined middle/high school located on a 7.3-acre site in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood. It opened for classes in fall 2003, accommodating 900 sixth through 12th-grade students, who had been housed temporarily in other area schools.

The school curriculum focuses heavily on the arts, which made both design and construction of the renovated facility grow out of a determined team effort to create something special.

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Arts Showcase

The design combined a complete renovation of the 84,332-sq-ft existing Houston Fine Arts Center with a new 112,516-sq-ft addition that wraps around the existing building.
The renovated building contains a concert hall, theater, black box acting studio, scene shop, design studio, costume shop, aerobics/weight room, and jazz, piano and choral studios.

The addition includes seven classroom clusters, two dance studios, two music rehearsal rooms, a library, practical and fine arts spaces, administrative offices and a commons area. The African dance studio has seating for 170 people as well.

Design priorities included daylight in all classrooms, creating a strong entry from the intersection of Montview and Quebec streets and reducing the mass of the building.
The architects also had to be certain it appropriately symbolized the arts by employing a creative use of materials and curved forms that let people know it's an arts school, not just another public school. It was built using three colors of brick, dramatic metal panels and lots of glass.

Chris Wineman, a principal with Semple Brown - which programmed and designed the arts venues in the school - said that the main intent was to keep the arts and academics integrated. "We wanted this to be a 'whole' school, despite its arts emphasis, so the space was designed to encourage interaction, not only of the different arts disciplines, but also with the academic subjects."

That integration is partly achieved through the construction of a 500-ft-long galleria, a large two-story circulation space that allows natural light into the interior depths of the building and serves as a performance and art display venue. The galleria also enables visitors to see inside the studios and classrooms to visualize learning and the creative process at work.

"All of us on the design team were determined that this building was not about making an architectural statement," Wineman said. "It was about an opportunity for kids to take the building over and make it their own creative space."

To that end, the team left the walls unpainted above the picture rails in "neutral, restrained colors" to allow for the display and creation of art on them.

The school also has state-of-the-art acoustics systems designed by Denver's D.L. Adams Associates, who worked closely with the architects to create sound isolation, all interior acoustics and the complex mechanical and audio-visual systems for the theater, including all of the rigging for the stage.

Ed Logsdon, vice president at D.L. Adams Associates, said that the acoustics work at DSA is the largest school contract his firm has done. "We helped give these students acoustics in their performing arts spaces that are on par with those in university theater programs. In fact, they are DCPA [Denver Center for the Performing Arts] quality in some cases."

The acoustics team also added a digital recording facility in the theater so students can record their performances for review and use in portfolios.

Making It Fit

The school, however, was not an easy one to build. Construction started in April 2001 and was completed in July 2003 - a 15-month construction schedule - except for the main theater, which finished in September.

"It was actually a tremendous challenge," Garcia said. "That's partly because the project got started six weeks late and the scope increased along the way. It started out at $15.5 million and ended up at around $18.5 million. It was a huge undertaking to get it open in time for last fall's classes."

Construction issues included bringing the existing Houston Arts Center up to code, adjusting for the differences in elevations between floors in the new building and the old one and making room for everything that had to go into a new school of this complexity.

Nick Dire, project manager for Taylor Kohrs/DRG, said: "The existing facility had very tight elevations between floors, so we had a tough time getting everything to fit. We had to change the ceiling heights and make lighting adjustments to upgrade the systems and meet code."

The 14-ft ceilings in the new addition had to be matched with the 12-ft ceilings in the existing building. A single bridge built on the second level ties the buildings together, but, "you can still the see the old building along the galleria. We didn't connect them everywhere," Dire said.

Code compliance issues included installation of new life safety systems and ADA adjustments.

"We even put a wheelchair lift from the second floor into the theater control room because we realized that this place isn't just about doing the performances but teaching students how to run them," said Mike Evango, operations manager for Taylor Kohrs/DRG.

"Once the school opened and the students arrived, we realized what a great job we'd all done," Dire said. "They finally have a place that's all theirs, and the best evidence of how comfortable they feel there is that they don't want to go home at night."

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