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DU Architect Mark Rodgers Insists that Masonry is the Key to Designing Great Buildings
Denver, CO (2001) - “No great building has ever been built out of anything but stone.” The quote by University of Denver Chancellor Daniel Ritchie has been one of the philosophies behind Mark Rodgers’ job. Rodgers is the university architect at DU, leading the design of the university’s ambitious building program, which totals around $300 million in planned, ongoing and completed projects. Among those are some of the most unique and high-profile educational buildings in the country, including a new performing arts complex, a law school, an upscale dormitory and an early learning center. Also included in the university’s building program are the recently completed Daniels College of Business and the Ritchie Center for Sports & Wellness. “We’ve undertaken some very important projects here,” Rodgers said. “And that’s in keeping with where we want to go as an institution. Dan Ritchie and (University Architect Emeritus) Cab Childress have created a legacy of building quality buildings at DU. We believe that there’s no great city in the world without a great university, and at the heart of those universities are great buildings.”
For Rodgers and the DU design team, a great building is one designed and constructed to last. He points out that universities are different from many other building owners who want structures that will have a prescribed tenant life, perhaps up to 30 years. Most of those owners sell their buildings before they develop big maintenance problems or sometimes even before the first set of long-term tenants leaves. Most of their buildings are just business investments, not design legacies or community landmarks. “But universities can’t do that,” Rodgers said. “We must plan to be in the same physical space for at least 100 years, and our structures must work to create a whole campus community. Universities use their long-life buildings partly as recruiting opportunities. Solid, enduring structures give students a sense of permanence and comfort. Besides, short-life buildings create debt load. They are much harder to maintain. Every good architect knows that you simply get more life span out of better buildings.” Rodgers also argues that cost should not be the deciding factor in using masonry to create those longer-life buildings. He said his education about masonry costs started even before he arrived at DU. “I was living back East in 1991 when Cab Childress first hired me to come out here and work with him. But he insisted that while driving out here, I stop at a stone quarry in Bloomington, Indiana. Stone is such an important part of DU’s design legacy that he wanted me to see directly what can and can’t be done cost effectively with it. That was one of the best things I’ve done as an architect because it started an education process that, as a design team, we still believe strongly in today.”
Rodgers believes that load-bearing masonry is one of the best ways to build, and its costs can be controlled once an architect understands how that masonry is created. “Here at DU, we are about longevity and style, costs aside. We will cut from our overall building program before we cut out masonry.” But, he insists, neither of those has to happen if architects understand what they’ve got to work with. He and his staff and the outside architects they employ have visited many other stone quarries in Utah and Colorado and discovered, in his words, that “each has its advantages and disadvantages.” “We’ve found that too often architects and contractors simply assume that stone costs more than brick or brick costs more than CMUs (concrete masonry units), but that’s not necessarily true. The trick is to understand what masonry mills do and how they cut their stone, how much labor is involved and so on.” Rodgers also said that architects need to trim their masonry costs down until they are only five or 10 percent higher than the cost of other materials would be, then find a way to save that 10 percent elsewhere in the program. And, if architects want to use masonry cost effectively, they need to work more closely with masons from the beginning of the design process, even doing the shop drawings together. He said that many times masons are involved too late in the building process.
“I give Cab (Childress) a lot of credit for discovering and then teaching me that talking with the trades early on is where you get some of the best design ideas. We cut the costs in half for the limestone on the Fisher Early Learning Center, simply by changing the shop drawings. We were able to use a great masonry product and spend about the same as everyone else is spending on materials of lesser quality because we had visited the mill and worked directly with the masons there.” Rodgers admitted that university architects do not typically do what he and his staff do. But they don’t do it alone. “We also work very closely with the commercial architectural community here. We hire good architects to help us, and together, our designs prove that.” Recent projects have paired the DU team with some of Colorado’s best educational design firms: The Davis Partnership; Anderson Mason Dale; Andrews & Anderson; Bennett, Wagner & Grody; and H+L Architects working with SBRA. Masons include Soderberg Masonry, Glover Masonry Associates, Bret Terry Masonry, and Lueck Masonry working with some of the area’s biggest GCs: Gerald H. Phipps, Weitz Co., Calcon, Adolfson & Peterson, Etkin-Skanska, PCL, Haselden and Saunders. Rodgers said that the DU building philosophy is made clear to everyone who works with them: “We just don’t believe it’s worth the trouble to build a cheap building. Our goal is to build solid, quality buildings that make people smile.” |
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