Formerly known as Harman Hall, the Cherry Creek North gem was built at the turn of the 20th century and is an integral part of Denver history. Often referred to as the city’s most iconic residence, the building served as a town hall before being converted into a stylish residence. However, like many buildings of its age, this Colorado landmark also has its secrets, including a former speakeasy (a remnant of the days of Prohibition, when passwords and hidden rooms were the norm). Today, the expansive home is a renovated dream space on the market for approximately $15 million, making it by far the priciest listing in the area.

Purchased by Pat Hamill, CEO of Oakwood Homes, the historic residence certainly needed a little TLC. Hamill was just the man to return the home to its former glory. After an epic 2010 expansion and renovation, the former Harman Hall is now a contemporary residence that retains nods to its iconic past, complete with authentic turn-of-the-century touches like reclaimed wood and blast-from-the-past patterns.

For his part, Hamill felt that the “iconic home” was special, and certainly worth all the trouble. In addition to expanding the residence’s square footage by approximately 7,000 square feet and gutting the interior, he also paid homage to the house’s past by restoring its original red brick facade. In a nod to the former speakeasy, Hamill also transformed the lowest level into a private event space fit for Prohibition-era partying, though it now hosts charity events and gathering rather than secret social meetings.

The former speakeasy also has another more modern function. Connecting to an underground showroom with space for up to 10 cars, the space serves as a showcase for grandeur and luxury, complete with a hydraulic lift and connecting three-car garage.

Though replete with modern touches like heated wood floors, floor-to-ceiling doors, and elevators, the former Harman Hall remains an iconic cornerstone of Denver architecture. Now a sprawling luxury residence, the historic home retains much of its turn-of-the-century charm with nods to the past that can be seen everywhere from its restored brick facade to its speakeasy-turned-entertainment space. And while you may not need a secret handshake or code word to enter this majestic manor, you do need a cool $15 million to make it your own. But perhaps that’s price worth paying for this unique piece of Denver history.

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“Since Aspen Snowmass first opened in 1946-47, Aspen, Colorado’s average temperature has warmed by three degrees Fahrenheit,” explains Aspen Skiing Company, who commissioned the project. “In total, Aspen Snowmass has lost 30 days of winter since 1980 alone. This season, as part of our 75th anniversary, we’ve installed The Melted Gondola art installation at the top of Aspen Mountain to get people thinking about the next 75 years – and to draw attention to the urgent need to aggressively address climate change.”

Launched in partnership with the nonprofit Protect Our Winters (POW), the campaign takes inspiration from a piece by James Dive and The Glue Society called “Hot with the Chance of a Late Storm”, a similarly melting ice cream truck installed on the beach in Sydney, Australia. Protect Our Winters is a community of athletes, scientists, creatives, and business leaders working to advance non-partisan climate policies. “We need a movement to create large-scale policy change on climate,” says Auden Schendler, Aspen Skiing Company’s SVP of Sustainability. “POW is that movement, mobilizing the outdoor industry as a political force.”

POW and Aspen Skiing Company hope the sculpture will provoke an emotional reaction in onlookers as they arrive on the mountain. Many visitors look forward to their mountain excursion all year, and shorter snow seasons can be highly disappointing. With Aspen warming by about 0.4 degrees per decade, a future in which skiing is no longer possible may be within sight. The groups hope anyone moved by the installation will write to their senators, pressure their favorite businesses to use their voices and influence in Washington, or work to affect small changes like clean energy standards in their own towns.

The installation is rendered even more poignant by the dramatic juxtaposition of two recent events in Colorado: a rare winter wildfire that killed at least four people and destroyed nearly 1,000 homes in the Boulder area, and the 10 inches of snow that extinguished it. On the day the fire started, the area was experiencing unusually high winds after months of drought. The fires blazed across an urban area once thought to be much safer than forested areas in terms of fire risk, burning down a Target and a hotel.

“The record warm temperatures we’ve had in Colorado definitely played a role in this,” says Jennifer Balch, fire scientist and the director of the Earth Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, in an interview with Colorado Public Radio. “Our temperatures across the Front Range between June and December were the warmest on record going back to the early 1960s. Climate change is essentially keeping our fuels drier longer. These grasses that we’re burning during this event, they’ve been baked, essentially, all fall and all winter. And then, on top of that, we didn’t get a lick of moisture.”

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“We wanted to design a museum that not only eliminated physical barriers but created a completely shared experience, as well,” said Benjamin Gilmartin, a partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Manhattan-based architecture firm that designed the building.

The accessible experience begins in the lobby, where visitors can request transport chairs, noise-canceling headphones, assistive listening devices, touchscreen styluses, and sensory-input items like fidget tools and weighted lap pads. Additionally, before they get started, patrons can customize their museum tour by adding preferences to an electronic tag. They can select aids like audio-described videos, high-contrast or enlarged fonts for captions, and text-to-speech screen readers. As the visitor enters each exhibit, the programmed tag automatically turns on the desired effects.

The tour starts with an elevator ride to the top floor and works its way through the exhibits, descending each floor with accessibly sloped ramps that are wide enough for two wheelchairs to comfortably pass. “From the earliest stages of design, the team consulted a committee of Paralympic athletes and persons with disabilities to ensure that, from entrance to exit, all visitors with or without disabilities could tour the USOPM facility together and share a common path,” the architects say on their website. In a cool symbolic way, that common 400-foot-long path also allows people to emulate the journey of an Olympic skier on their downhill run to glory.

All the flooring in the 60,000-square-foot museum is a uniform polished concrete, eliminating mobility obstructions. Plus, all videos play with open captions and American Sign Language translations. All touchscreens have tactile keypads to assist the visually impaired.

The 12 gallery halls housed within the museum’s three floors tell the story of Olympic contenders stretching back as far as the first Greek Games in 776 B.C. Visitors can read about each of the 154 inductees to the Olympic & Paralympic Hall of Fame, race against their favorite animated athlete on an interactive track, take on the giant slalom via simulator, and see a collection of modern Olympic torches. And of course, there’s also a plethora of gear, uniforms, and inspirational quotes from many beloved athletes throughout the space.

Outside, in keeping with the athleticism of the Olympians, the multi-angled facade of the exterior structure and its nearly 9,000 reflective anodized aluminum panels continue the feeling of motion. Across a pedestrian and wheelchair-friendly plaza, Diller Scofido + Renfro also designed a multipurpose structure with an outdoor amphitheater. The interior contains a café, a flexible theater that can accommodate up to 26 wheelchairs, and an event space with mountain vistas and a 500-square-foot terrace.

Nestled in the shadow of Pikes Peak, the Colorado Springs museum is located just three miles from the Olympic Training Center, where more than 15,000 Olympic and Paralympic athletes hone their skills each year. While the OTC is not currently accepting visitors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, patrons at the new museum are welcome seven days a week from 10 AM to 5 PM.

The post New Museum Makes the Olympics an Inclusive Experience for All first appeared on Dornob.

So when a Colorado company debuted “Stackhouse,” a housing project consisting of stacked metal shipping containers, the comparisons were inevitable. In r/ABoringDystopia on Reddit, one user asks, “Why can’t we have normal ‘affordable’ housing instead of living in shipping containers and other things the capitalist class can no longer use?”

It’s a fair question. People around the world were already adapting shipping containers into makeshift housing out of pure necessity before this type of “upcycled” architecture was a trend. It’s true that once shipping containers are no longer usable for the transportation of goods, they can make a convenient module for experimental structures, and modular architecture is often more sustainable than conventional construction. But the truth is, shipping containers aren’t actually all that great to live in for a variety of reasons.

Set to open its doors in August 2022, Stackhouse professes to be “the first company to build vertical infrastructure for moveable containers,” as co-founder and CEO Janelle Briggs told Denverite. The idea is you can buy a unit in one city and then transport the whole thing somewhere else when you feel like moving. Meanwhile, stacking the units takes up less valuable real estate in desirable cities, adding to the availability of affordable housing.

But, as Reddit pointed out, the problem lies in how we define “affordable,” and the quality level we’re willing to accept for the price. Stackhouse is presented as housing the average person should actually want, with 320 square feet of living space within a 40-foot shipping container. Laid out either as a studio or one bedroom, each unit has a full kitchen, solar panels, and a bathroom with a tub. The units will be stacked eight stories high with 62 total slots. While the prices for the containers themselves range from $110,000 to $130,000, the actual price of occupying a “slot” brings the price up to as much as $350,000.

That’s a lot of money to live in a metal box measuring less than eight feet wide inside. By comparison, the median closing price for an attached residential home in Denver was $375,000 in August. In more expensive cities like Seattle or San Francisco, good luck finding so much as a shanty for less than half a million dollars. When these are our options for so-called affordable housing, who wins? (The developers, who are the ones lobbying your state senators to prevent the construction of actual affordable housing, of course).

Sure, there are people who are going to be happy to live in this shipping container complex. But it’s a slippery slope. Both rent and real estate prices are skyrocketing all over the world, and the choices we’re presented with seem to keep getting smaller and lower quality at the same time. Choosing to limit your possessions and live in a tiny home is one thing. Being forced into substandard housing because it’s all you can afford is another. The idea to reuse shipping containers as housing was well-intended, but it’s time to move onto more humane solutions.

The post Real-Life “Ready Player One”: $300K Shipping Container Homes in Colorado first appeared on Dornob.