Located on one of the last remaining infill sites in historic downtown Boulder, 909 calls into question the solidity and opacity of the surrounding built context.
The street is composed primarily of masonry facades and the city regulatory body requested that the building be brick. Our intent, for a modern structure, is to dematerialize the typical solidity of the streetscape and allow a gradual weaving of the public street space with “public” space of the building, allowing some programmatic and visual overlap between the street and the building’s interior. In lieu of brick, a terra-cotta shading facade regulates solar heat gain and recontextualizes the historic building material in a modern setting.
The street level space was designed for a restaurant client and the two upper levels as speculative office. The client asked for an “exemplary” building for this tight site requiring the use of healthy building standards, and daylighting of each primary space, while still maximizing the site’s allowable buildable area.