Bison Ridge Recreation Center

The City Council, and the citizens they represent, wanted to create a new center for Commerce City focused on well-being for the community. Commerce City’s population is growing fast and there was a clear need for a recreation center which helped bridge the city’s past and future between its beginning as an farming community to its industrial present.

The site is on the northern edge of town which connects the agrarian Northern Colorado to the metropolitan center of Denver, in what is often described as the “Prairie Gateway.”  The organization of the program, from the earliest sketches, was reflected in a composition of gabled forms intended to recall a cluster of farm buildings – the homestead.

The project is very much of of its place, balancing an industrial character with the typology of early Colorado settler buildings. The larger forms in deep patina metal and rustic lap-board siding, combined with rugged Colorado buff sandstone and ample glass reveal its function as a vital center of community activity.