Affordable Housing, Mass Timber, Multifamily

Globeville Affordable Housing & Library

This Denver mass timber apartment community combines the organic with the industrial.

Carefully composed with an eye toward the poetics of its materials, Chicago-based architect John Ronan’s new 173-unit Globeville Affordable Housing complex in Denver looks to inspiration from the surrounding neighborhood’s industrial past.

Exposed CLT panels, glass, and perforated, corrugated-metal panels reflect the manufacturing that took place there, and the way they are used offers a new way forward for the community.

“Globeville is where Denver located its dirtiest industries, like smelting,” Ronan says. “This history informed our selection of sustainable CLT for the building structure.” It’s a fitting choice for the neighborhood, but also for the larger Denver area, which is becoming something of a hub for potential mass timber construction in the U.S.

Globeville Affordable Housing & Library

Photo Credit: John Ronan Architects

The program, which includes a public library within the affordable housing complex, reprises one that’s been used for several communities in Chicago designed by Perkins&Will’s Ralph Johnson, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Brian Lee, and Ronan himself. While these earlier projects were primarily built in concrete, Ronan notes that “CLT lends itself well to affordable housing because affordable housing tends to be on the smaller side and modular.”

The two U-shaped apartment blocks each place five stories of CLT-framed residential units atop one-story cast-in-place concrete pedestals. The resulting second-floor courtyards face north and west and will be planted with trees of the same wood species as the adjoining buildings’ structure, either cedar or Douglas fir. The library, which will serve the broader community, will be housed in the concrete podium and have an entrance on Washington Street, which runs along the east side of the property.

Globeville Affordable Housing & Library

Drawing Credit: John Ronan Architects

Residential units range from one-bedroom through four-bedroom configurations; townhouse units have dedicated entrances at grade. Upper-level units share a double-loaded corridor on each level, with jogs in each hall mitigating corridor length and creating discernable entry nodes for groups of apartments that typically share a small outdoor space.

The design calls for prefabricated mass timber components with up to 18-foot CLT spans joined plywood spline connections; bearing walls are set perpendicular to the exterior walls. Each unit is 10 feet tall and its length varies in 10-feet increments. A 5-ply CLT floor was chosen as the most economical 2-hour fire-rated floor assembly that also met acoustic and vibration control requirements.

Globeville Affordable Housing & Library

Sketch & Render Credit: John Ronan Architects

Ronan’s work has always been known for his dexterity with materials. At Globeville, the architect has conceived the building’s exterior with a nod to the area’s blue collar industrial past. The east building will be clad in corrugated Cor-ten steel while the west building is clad in corrugated galvanized metal. Early design studies suggest a variety of configurations for the metal panels with each option providing an alluring contrast with the exposed wood behind glass. While the design remains in development and could change in its details, it is in deft hands.

Ronan wanted to avoid a design that hid the mass timber behind the exterior cladding. “[This] often results in CLT buildings that look no different from other buildings from the exterior,” he says. “To combat this, we are putting glazing in front of the CLT on the façade so that you can see the structure from the building exterior.” By deliberately mis-registering the glazing panels and CLT openings so that each glass panel covers both the window opening and the adjacent structure, Ronan exposes the CLT as part of a lively façade that makes the most of each of the building’s materials.