David Hill

David Hill, a journalist based in Denver, writes frequently about architecture, design, and urban planning.
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The Forum at Marvin Hall

Study Hall: University of Kansas architecture students design and build a sophisticated expansion of their school.
David Hill
November 15, 2015
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There’s a disconnect that runs through your mind when you set foot inside the Forum, an addition to Marvin Hall, the School of Architecture, Design & Planning at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.


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Future of Denver's Boettcher Concert Hall Uncertain

David Hill
September 25, 2014
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Photo © Semple Brown Design Denver’s Boettcher Concert Hall Boettcher Concert Hall, home of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, is barely known outside of Denver these days, but it wasn’t always so. Few remember the buzz surrounding its opening in 1978. Designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates (with the late acoustician Christopher Jaffe) as a key component of the downtown Denver Performing Arts Complex, Boettcher was the first concert hall in the nation with “in the round” seating, a cutting-edge idea at the time. Critics loved the place. Photo © Architectural Record Boettcher featured in the March 1979 issue of Architectural
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Aspen Art Museum

Aspen Art Museum

Woven into Place: Shigeru Ban's first U.S. building since winning the Pritzker adds a landmark to a city's downtown while looking out to its Rocky Mountain setting.
David Hill
August 16, 2014
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Stand on the corner of South Spring Street and East Hyman Avenue in downtown Aspen, Colorado, and you see two entrances to Shigeru Ban’s box-like Aspen Art Museum, his first completed project in the United States since winning the 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize. To your right is the main entrance, a recessed section in the building’s striking woven-lattice exterior.


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Newsmaker: Barry Svigals

David Hill
April 16, 2014
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Image courtesy Svigals + Partners Svigals + Partners' proposed scheme for a new elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Dubbed "Main Street," this design is "like two arms embracing the children as they come in," says Barry Svigals. It’s one thing for an architect to design a new school, quite another when that school is on the site of one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history. On December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. The school has since been razed. In September, the town’s Public
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Denver Union Station is a "Game Changer"

David Hill
April 1, 2014
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An opening in the SOM-designed canopy over the train platform has am opening that frames the historic Denver Union Station. The neon sign on top of Denver’s historic Union Station says “Travel by Train,” a reminder of the bygone era when up to 80 trains a day would stop at the busy depot. In recent years, however, the building’s grand waiting room has sat empty except for the few Amtrak passengers waiting to catch the California Zephyr to Chicago or San Francisco.


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Marquez Hall, Colorado School of Mines

Fuel School: A team of architects designs an open, inviting new home for a university’s petroleum engineering department.
David Hill
November 15, 2013
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Golden, Colorado, about 20 miles west of Denver, is probably best known for a certain beer brewed in a massive plant on the city’s eastern edge.


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Newsmaker: Charles Jencks

David Hill
October 4, 2013
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A Maggie's Centre, designed by Snøhetta, opened in Aberdeen, Scotland, on September 23. Architecture can’t cure cancer, but good design has the power to heal. That’s the philosophy behind Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres, a network of drop-in facilities in Great Britain. The centers—17 and growing—are named for writer and landscape architect Maggie Keswick Jencks, who died of breast cancer in 1995. Married to the influential American architecture critic and landscape architect Charles Jencks, Maggie spent the last two years of her life conceiving a warm, inviting place where cancer patients could spend time learning how to cope with their disease
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