
The Van Hummell Building, designed 1951 by Edwin Francis.

A beautiful multi-faceted red standstone building right off of Speer Blvd. in Denver. It is now the American Red Cross building.

Edwin Francis also designed the stone Crest House sitting atop Mt. Evans in Evergreen, CO. The Crest House is currently in ruins, but there has been talk about restoration.

I had to make more than a few passes by this building to get lighting that I wanted, as the design is intended for the shadows to change drastically throughout the day.


The Mullen Home for Nurses was built in 1936, designed by
the great Temple Buell. It is a strong vertically oriented Art Deco design.

It is similar to two other surviving Art Deco masterpieces Buell also designed, the Horace Mann High School, which also has similar brickwork. . .

. . .and the other is The Paramount Theatre, where decorative elements are created from terracotta, instead of brick.

Click on this photo above and look at the brickwork. How do you design that on paper? How do you communicate those designs to the bricklayer?

And this entry way below. . . it is just staggering.


Mullen Home for Nurses

This butterfly roof office building is most likely from the 1950s. The perspective of this building looks completely different when looked from the front or back. From the front, the rear of the building does not seem very high.

In this second shot you can see that the eave actually narrows as it heads toward the rib of the two roof sections, adding to the drama of the soaring height of the rear of this building.

If you are a Denver resident, you probably drive by this building all the time, but you would have had to carefully catch it out of the corner of your eye as you fly by on 18th Ave!

Usonian is the name applied by Frank Lloyd Wright to the architectural style he developed in the 1930s. It was intended to be a new vernacular U.S. style aimed at a futuristic utopia, hence US-onia. The other variant modernist style for the time period is called International style.

It is an outstanding example of a Usonian office building, the jutting eaves, the floor to ceiling windows, the garden, the clerestory windows. . .

This structure bears a strong resemblance to Victor Hornbein’s Usonian design, the Ross-Broadway Library from 1951. I have never seen this office building listed as a Hornbein design, but I at least assume it is from the same time period.


This office building has that futuristic look from the late-’60s-early ’70s, the era when traveling to the moon became a reality.


This office building in Lakewood, CO probably dates from the early 1960s.

It’s a great design with the cantilever over the lower windows, and the clerestory windows between the beams at the top.
I will be posting office buildings this whole week.

Nice, simple modern office building in Lakewood, CO. I would date it at late 1960s, early 1970s.

What is most interesting are the supports. Apartment buildings built like this over their parking lots are referred to as “dingbats”. I don’t think it applies to office buildings?

You can also see the slight slant to the windows.

I am not an engineer, so I am not quite sure how supports like these hold the weight of the building. I like how the building seems to float on air.

Some of the last extra shots I had wanted to post from my Arapahoe Acres shots. I will be rolling these into the existing posts.






I have one more post of these before I move on to something else and fold these extra pictures into my older posts.




Love this carport!

I am eventually rolling these pictures into my previous posts on Arapahoe Acres, but I like to post them to the front of this site, first.



I have also been updating other portions of this site, describing what movies and music I have been paying attention to lately. I also want to start another page listing my favorite hole-in-wall eateries!
