Denver, two Art Deco buildings

Architect Temple Buell is mostly known as designer and builder of the Cherry Creek mall – the first modern shopping mall in Denver. But I think there are some more projects he was working on. Let’s see if we can find them :)

Horace Mann Middle School and Mullen Building at St. Joseph Hospital both designed and built in the 1930s and both look really unusual. But first, let's learn more about an architect.

 

Born in Chicago on September 9, 1895, Temple Hoyne Buell grew up in Chicago and attended Lake Forest Academy. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a B.S. in Architecture and received his M.S. in Architecture from Columbia University. In 1917, Buell won the Prize of Rome in architecture, but World War I intervened before he could take advantage of the award.

He enlisted in the army and attended officer's training camp at Plattsburgh Barracks in New York. Upon being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Coast Artillery Corps, the army assigned him to duty in France. After attending additional army schools overseas, he was assigned to the 101st Trench Mortar Battery, in the 26th Division of the American Expeditionary Force. After the Battle of Chateau-Thierry, in which he was severely affected by poison gas, Buell returned to the U.S. to become adjutant to the Trench Artillery School in Fort Barrancas, Florida. He resigned from the army and returned to Chicago in 1919.

Buell worked for the Chicago firm Marshall and Fox and later with Rapp and Rapp designing hotels and theaters. Weakened lungs due to the gassing led to his relocation to Denver in 1921 to convalesce and spend a year in a sanatorium to recover from tuberculosis. He eventually returned to work part-time and shortly afterwards launched his firm under the name of Temple H. Buell, Architect. In 1923, he incorporated the office as T. H. Buell and Company, Architects. The practice specialized in the design and construction of commercial, public and residential buildings.

Among the many commissions completed by Buell and his firm is the Denver Paramount Theater (with Rapp and Rapp). In 1949, Temple Buell began construction of the Cherry Creek Shopping Center at East First Avenue and South University Boulevard in Denver. Buell previously purchased the property in 1925, but it took him 24 years of zoning disputes and political infighting to begin building what, at the time, was considered a major departure in retail architecture. Instead of positioning stores along the street edge or setting them back in a row behind off-street parking, Buell grouped stores together in the middle of the site fronting onto a common landscaped open-air courtyard. Parking lots surrounded the retail complex. Cherry Creek Shopping Center is considered one of the first pedestrian shopping malls in the country. It is this achievement for which Buell is most remembered.

The firm, T. H. Buell and Company, Inc. employed approximately 50 architects; site and master planners; structural, mechanical and electrical engineers; draftsmen; construction supervisors; and support personnel. He operated the company in Denver from 1923 until 1989.

Horace Mann Middle School built in 1939 (some sources say 1931). Horace Mann was a Massachusetts legislator and Antioch College president who became a nationally noted advocate of free coeducational schools for all. He also championed better training and pay for school teachers. Denver honored Mann with one of its more unusual schools, a brick mason’s tour de force with beige bricks that seem to grow out of the structure organically, like ivy. Architect Buell claimed “I dreamed up Horace Mann sitting one day on my porch watching sun and shadows on brickwork. For this school we employed only brick and all the effect we could create with it – classical, Gothic, Renaissance and modern – Art Deco.

And this is the best way to learn about this building – spend some time watching how the shadows moving across the walls, changing them from flat and usual to some fairy tail forest, growing just from the wall. Isn’t it beautiful?

But let’s leave the school and move to learn something about the medicine. Originally built as a Catherine Mullen Memorial Nurses Home in 1932 this building was a home for Nurses school and dormitory, and now it is part of the St. Joseph Hospital.

Money for its construction was donated by Ella Mullen Weckbaugh in memory of her mother, Catherine Smith Mullen, though the source of the family’s wealth was Ella’s father and Catherine’s husband, John K. Mullen.

John Mullen had an interesting life. According to Wikipedia, he was born in Ballinasloe, County Galway in the 1840s, moved to the United States when he was about 10 years old, and eventually settled with his family in Oriskany Falls, New York where he worked in a flour mill in his teenage years. That may not sound remarkable to most people, but his family’s choice of Oriskany Falls surprised me. Oriskany Falls is a tiny village in Central New York and it seems like a strange choice for Irish immigrants in the 1850s, as the town is land-locked in the center of New York State, it is several miles from the Erie Canal, and the area was still considered the frontier as late as the 1830s. In the nineteenth century, the countryside around Oriskany Falls was (and still is) largely agricultural, though by the 1850s there must have been sufficient industry to attract the Mullen family. However, John did not stay in Oriskany Falls for long. By his late teens, John Mullen moved west to seek his fortune in Kansas and later in Denver. He purchased his first flour mill in Denver in 1875 and by the 1880s owned several mills and consolidated the industry. He eventually diversified his investments to land and cattle, and was known for his philanthropic work as he grew older.

Temple Buell’s design for the Mullen Building included the use of a contrasting buff-brick body and deep-red brick piers. Each line of windows is connected from the ground to the parapet with these wonderful vertical piers of undulating brick. When you first glance at the building, it appears as though the red-brick piers are rising up to meet the sky, but the downward angles of the decoration also appear as though the brick is melting down the façade. Descriptions of the building often use both upward and downward vocabulary, with History Colorado calling the brick ornament “a rustic wheat tuft”, while another website calls it “waterfall” brickwork. Either way, Buell’s remarkable, dynamic design is uniquely his own creation.

The brick that Buell selected for the Mullen Building not only varied in color, but it varies in texture. If you look closely, you will notice that the buff brick of the building’s body has an etched spiral design on its stretchers and on some of its headers, though other headers have simple linear striations created by the extruded brick’s die. The red brick has similar spiral patterns intermixed with plain sides and striated headers.

Buell’s method for installing the brick is also unique. Typically, brick is laid in stretchers or headers, perhaps with a few upended or diagonally laid bricks to create ornament. At the Mullen Building, the red brick piers were created using alternating patterns of headers, stretchers, rowlocks (or headers oriented vertically), and soldiers (or stretchers oriented vertically). The buff brick body has several courses made with a mixture of stretchers and headers, and are separated by a course of recessed rowlock bricks. This irregular pattern of brick installation allows the outer wythe of brick to better bond with the inner back-up brick courses and creates a more stable wall system.

The both buildings, we were looking today, look so alike and so different in the same time. They are both are very unusual and give us an idea of spirit of the time, they are like the last sparks in the time when everything started to turn from unique, to standard. They are share not only the bricks body and author (or better to say creator, I guess) but also a spirit. The spirit of the time that left only small footprints in our memory and human's history…

I'm sure this hill is where it stood.

Amazing shapes of stuccoed wood.

A glass-brick, neon stream-lined place.

As if it flew from outer space,

A swing band auditorium,

An Art Deco emporium,

When romance, innocent in pace,

From dancing to a teasing chase.

The town grew west in modern haste

And down it came, without a trace.

The war and culture's change in taste,

Predestined doom, the past erased.

The future sighs, with solemn face

The wrecking ball, the glittered waste

No plaque to read "Historic Sight".

The swirling dust, a dance goodnight.

Gene Bourne

Pictures were taken on September 29, 2018.