University of Colorado Denver Student Commons

Since opening in August 2014, 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.

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. This new building allows a central location for students to give them a better sense of community, with larger classrooms, a central location for staff, and innovative teaching spaces.

With construction taking place on a busy student campus in downtown Denver, well-planned site logistics were 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 the 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.

This project received LEED Gold Certification in 2014.