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Semple Brown subsequently reworked the building's old auditorium space into the Ellie Caulkins Opera House. Rock and roundball legacy aside, it was not necessarily designed with aesthetics or acoustics in mind. venue in 1968 and the home arena for the Denver Nuggets a few years later.

The antiquated building was the country's second largest auditorium (after Madison Square Garden) when it hosted the Democratic National Convention in 1908, and later gained fame as Led Zeppelin's first U.S. Semple Brown Design moved into performing arts venues in the early 1990s, transforming a chunk of the Denver Municipal Auditorium into the Temple Hoyne Buell Theatre at the Denver Performing Arts Complex. 'What we try to do is peel back and subtract, and be really authentic about what we add back.' 'We cherish historic buildings or even industrial buildings,' Sarah says. Historic buildings bring plenty of challenges, but they also represent an aesthetic opportunity. More recent restorations are RedLine, Highlands Ranch Mansion and The Kitchen Next Door Union Station. The firm's early work includes the Ice House in LoDo and the revitalization of Larimer Square in the early 1990s. As architect Carl Elefante famously put it, 'The greenest building is the one already built.'Įchoes Semple Brown Project Designer Leila Schwyhart: 'Buildings that don't work, we try to give them life again.' In tough economic times, necessity is the mother of invention, and that's not really a bad thing. 'We were doing a lot of restoration projects back then.' 'In the early '80s, we had just come out of a recession,' says Sarah. Semple Brown has designed restaurants, theaters, residential projects, schools, churches, offices and most every other kind of building under the sun, from Denver to Abu Dhabi.īut restoration and adaptive reuse might just be Semple Brown's strongest suits - as has been the case from the very beginning. 'We're fairly diverse in the projects we do,' says Sarah Semple Brown, who started the Denver architecture and design firm with her husband, Rusty Brown, in 1982. It's difficult to pigeonhole Semple Brown Design.

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