Printers Hill Master Plan – Preservation as a Driver of Urban Form

In 2021, after nearly 130 years in service as a destination for wellness and restoration among the mountains of Colorado’s Front Range, the 25-acre Union Printers Home campus was put up for auction. For the first time since it opened in 1892, the site, along with its magnificent “Castle” building, three additional historic buildings, and dramatic pastoral landscapes were facing the prospect of reinvention. The planned sale of the property brought together a group of local families with reverence for the site and its grand structures, and a shared interest in breathing new life into one of the city’s most historic and distinctive places. These families came together as the Union Printers Partners (“Partners”), and after putting forth a winning bid for the property, they embarked on a 14-month process to investigate the site, along with 30 acres of adjacent underdeveloped property. Their aim was to put forth a plan that reuses the historic buildings, reestablishes the prominence of key landscapes, and celebrates the extraordinary relationship between the property and the Front Range. Through this planning process emerged a vision for an entirely new kind of place in Colorado Springs: Printers Hill.

After closing on the site, the Partners engaged a multidisciplinary team of technical and design professionals to help them understand the history, conditions, and potential of the site. With little known about the condition of the buildings, site infrastructure, and what opportunities existed for adaptive reuse, the Partners sought to first conduct a phase of due diligence. Led by the prime planning and design consultant (comprising planning and urban design, landscape architecture, and architecture), a team of seventeen subject-matter expert firms, including site surveyors, building scanners, arborists, historic preservation architects, civil, structural, and mechanical engineers, transportation planners, electrical and utility consultants, and others worked to study the site. This team inventoried on-site features and elements to evaluate existing conditions and help establish a baseline of understanding ahead of visioning. This work included determining the age and health of the site’s thousand-plus trees, identifying necessary stabilization projects, and building a comprehensive digital model of the 25-acre site and its historic buildings.

With the first detailed accounting of the site’s conditions assembled, the Partners worked with the consultant team to set goals for redevelopment of the site. The Partners purchased the site and embarked on this planning process with the objective of protecting its unique buildings, its setting within the city, and its dialogue with the Front Range and Pikes Peak. The work of establishing the project mission, values, and vision statement was built upon that foundation. The Partners decided early on that the future of Union Printers Home should refer to its past, as a place for wellness and connection with the region’s natural setting. Acting as stewards of its legacy and the future of Colorado Springs, the Partners, in collaboration with their planning, design, and economic advisory team, determined that the site should both honor its history and usher in a new holistic model of innovative development and public space, unlike anything else in Colorado Springs.

Recognizing the importance of the site and its future to the communities around it, the team assembled a Planning Advisory Task Force (“PATF”), comprising nearly 40 members representing city agencies, community and neighborhood groups, and other interested local stakeholders. Members of this task force were invited to participate in several meetings throughout the project, participate in tours of the property, host conversations with their communities about the emerging vision, and contribute their perspectives on the future of the site in Colorado Springs. The PATF served as a valuable channel of communication between the community and the planning team, and initiated the first step in the public engagement process that eventually led to larger-scale community events and formal submission of the plan for approval by the Colorado Springs City Council.

Concurrent with the site investigations conducted at the outset of the project, a team of economic analysts studied the local and regional real estate market to identify demand and potential uses for the site. This analysis informed a diverse program mix, inspired by the goal of making the site a lively mixed-use place that offered space for locals and visitors alike. The proposed vision includes nearly a thousand new residential units, office space, including a potential coworking venue, clustered retail at key activation sites, community and cultural uses, including a proposed children’s museum, and a boutique hotel. While this plan proposes a substantial quantity of new development and some of the highest densities in Colorado Springs, thirty-five percent of the site is designated for publicly-accessible parks and open space.

To explore the potential future integration of adaptively reused historic buildings and new development on site, the planning team conducted an iterative visioning process with the Partners, exploring global case studies, reviewing precedent projects, assembling palettes of visual inspiration, and touring projects within the U.S. and abroad. The team workshopped several potential site framework organizations, based on themes that resonated with the client. These early ideas explored different approaches to density, development heights, adaptive reuse strategies, program distribution, the public realm, site sustainability, and the formal relationship between the historic structures and landscapes, namely Front Range and Pikes Peak. These numerous framework options were further refined into three distinct scenarios, from which a final plan emerged.

The final plan is organized around the site’s core, sitting atop the crest of the future district’s namesake hill, where each of the four historic buildings will be adaptively reused and expanded to accommodate a range of new uses, including the hotel, food and beverage facilities, a grocery store, creative office space, a food hall, and various housing types, including townhomes, apartments, and condominiums. Leading to the core from each of the site’s perimeter streets are broad open space corridors featuring a wide range of active and passive landscapes. These corridors encapsulate many of the site’s historic landscapes and flora, including the central lawn, the unique grotto, and the majority of the site’s existing healthy trees, which served as an organizing feature of the plan’s layout. The most prominent of these corridors sits between Memorial Park, to the west of the site, and the Castle building’s primary façade—protecting and enhancing a historic landscape connection and dramatic viewport between the Castle and Pikes Peak.

Building on the site-organizing framework plan, the planning team developed guidance for each development and public realm parcel within the property. Design principles were established to inform the design of each component of the master plan vision, referencing the unique features of the Colorado and Front Range context and the design language of the historic Castle and other buildings to inform the design of new developments and landscapes—establishing a unified and authentic design language for the district. This more detailed guidance included conceptual design and layout of buildings, landscapes, and elements of the public realm, along with urban design guidelines to inform future implementation and ensure alignment with the overall district vision. These guidelines informed the location of site access, views, development volumes and openings, architectural articulation, parking, service areas, sustainability features, and more.

With an overall vision and design guidance established through the master plan, the team worked with the Partners to chart the course through to implementation. This included guidance on rezoning the site to secure entitlements that will enable implementation of the vision, phasing of infrastructure, sustainability features, development sites, and the district’s public realm, and ideas for initial site preparation and activation ahead of redevelopment activities. The planning and design process and the resulting plan for Printers Hill were born from the unique attributes of this site and the bold vision of its owners to create a place that would embody and serve the mind, body, and soul of Colorado Springs—just as this property had for generations before.