University of Colorado Denver Student Commons

The University of Colorado Denver has grown significantly since 1912, with over 14,000 enrolled students in its downtown Denver campus alone. Saunders was more than honored to build CU Denver's first ever ground-up building on the Auraria Campus. The Student Commons Building has helped CU Denver gain a stronger identity on the campus and has already become an important landmark in the City of Denver. This new building allows a central location for students to give them a better sense of community, with larger classrooms, central location for its staff and innovative teaching spaces.

With construction taking place on a busy student campus in downtown Denver, a well-planned site logistics was critical to maintaining safety on-site and limiting impact to the campus’ daily routine. All utilities needed to be brought into the Student Commons Building site from surrounding streets. Some of the utilities were as deep as 20 feet. A complete temporary bus loop was constructed to redirect RTD buses during a major portion of construction. This allowed the schedule of one bus every seven minutes to experience zero interruptions in service.

The building was open to students and staff in August 2014 and is LEED Gold Certified.