Biophilic design is having a moment in Denver.
Credit: Iwan Baan/Sarah Schumacher for Bloomberg
Scoring an Architectural Breakthrough in Denver’s RiNo District
With its fractured facade and biophilic design, MAD Architects’ One River North evokes the canyons of the Rockies in one of Denver’s fastest-growing neighborhoods.
(This story is part of “ Look at That Building ,” a Bloomberg CityLab series about everyday — and not-so-everyday — architecture. To get more content like it, sign up for the Design Edition newsletter .)
Just north of downtown Denver, a wave of artist studios and craft breweries is drawing young professionals to a formerly industrial area known as the River North Arts District, or RiNo. The region grew by nearly 500,000 people between 2010 and 2020.
Apartment developers are right on their heels. RiNo is situated in an Opportunity Zone — a designated metropolitan census tract where average income is 80% or less of a state’s median family income — meaning real estate investors can avoid capital gains taxes if they hold onto their investments for at least 10 years.
This combination of hip murals and tax deferrals made RiNo the perfect environment for One River North. This new residential mid-rise looks nothing like any other building in Denver — or anywhere, really. Ma Yansong, founder of MAD Architects, hopes the fractured facade and exposed “canyon” of One River North is just the start of a better way to design buildings in the city. “It’s a statement,” Ma says. “It’s cracking modern architecture.”
The showstopping project was developed by Max Collaborative, a second act of sorts for Jon and Kevin Ratner. They’re brothers from the family behind Forest City Realty Trust, the REIT that turned the former Stapleton International Airport into what is now Denver’s Central Park neighborhood. The Ratners’ new company, formed after the nearly century-old family business was sold to Brookfield Properties in 2018, focuses on multifamily housing in Los Angeles and Denver.
“We like up-and-coming neighborhoods,” says Kevin Ratner, managing partner at Max Collaborative. “Where are the art galleries and the restaurants? Because what comes right after is apartment buildings for young professionals.”
One River North stands out from its competition in its appearance as well as its height. The 187-unit building opened in May with rents ranging from $1,800 to $16,000. Its 14 income-restricted units were set aside in order to meet city requirements for a density bonus: a height increase from 12 to 16 stories.
Replacing a one-story warehouse facility on a site that brushes up against a river of freight and light rail tracks, Ma saw an opportunity to shake up the expectations of urban residential architecture in one of the fastest-growing areas of the US. “We’ve done many projects around the theme of nature, but most of them are public buildings like museums or an opera house,” says Ma, also the architect behind Haikou’s Wormhole Library and Los Angeles’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. “You can play with a lot of spatial language in public buildings, but in residential architecture everyone focuses on efficiency and function.”
MAD had already designed multiple residential projects in North America, including a pair of curvy glass towers just outside Toronto and a low-rise complex with a living green wall facade in Beverly Hills. The firm also recently completed a major social housing complex in Beijing. In Denver, the architect took inspiration from the Rocky Mountains — a direction that he describes as “something different, something more contextual.” Ma is known for his biophilic designs, which draw on shapes and materials found in nature; decrying the lack of spirituality in modern architecture, he says that his firm prefers to create places that are “in-between futuristic and organic.”
Most Denverites will only experience One River North from the outside, where they’ll see its northwest-facing glass facade appearing to crack open across floors 6 through 10 and up the middle to its top floor. Tenants, however, can walk along the facade’s ravine, which functions as an external courtyard with plantings, a multi-level water feature and common areas. Units from floor 9 through 16 contain private balconies built into the exposed facade. Ma said that the firm aimed to make these canyon views available to the public, but there are no current plans by the property to provide access.
Curving walls meant to resemble rock formations exist throughout the building’s shared indoor spaces as well. Made from a custom fabricated mesh plaster “chip” system — in which each chip was individually molded, attached to the structure and laser-scanned — the resulting formations were then covered in stucco and painted. “I didn’t want any columns,” Ma says. “When you see a column, you realize it’s a building. We found a middle ground, hiding the columns with landscape, so people are more focused on the undulating curves on the ceilings and the floor.”
This treatment is also found along the building’s first floor roofline as well, creating a dramatic separation from the glass curtain wall that breaks up again from floors six through nine. Individual units facing the canyon were also designed to flow seamlessly into the building’s signature feature. “It’s so cool and spectacular and unusual,” says Ratner. (The project team would not disclose how much One River North cost to build.)
Designed out of MAD’s Los Angeles office, One River North seems like a natural fit for the Denver region, where tourists and residents alike flock to its forests, mountains and rivers. And biophilia seems to be the word of the year in the city’s design community. A summer exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, “Biophilia: Nature Reimagined,” featured examples of humanity’s intertwining with nature through design, including buildings such as Studio Gang’s Populus (which opened this fall in downtown Denver), as well as Ma’s Nanjing Himalayas Center in China.
Multifamily residential projects continue to sprout in RiNo, and Ma sees One River North’s organic design as a suggestion to its future neighbors. “If every building has this they can be connected, the city of the future can really become three dimensional with nature,” says the architect. “This is more like a starting project.”
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