User:Djflem/Anschutz Medical Campus buildings

Aurora, Colorado counts among the 60 largest cities in the United States, with a population greater than such cities as Pittsburgh, Buffalo or Salt Lake City, but lacks a skyline typical of cities its size. This is due to Aurora’s largely suburban character and relatively small central business district. Indeed, “Original Aurora”, the city’s traditional downtown, has only one building of notable height. During Aurora’s most intense period of growth in the 1970s and 1980s, the area in the geographic center of the city near the I-225 freeway and Aurora Mall (now Aurora Town Center) was envisioned as “Aurora City Center”, a new downtown complete with a collection of tall office buildings. However, these plans have yet to materialize and a large tract of undeveloped land still lies east of Aurora Town Center. As is typical of suburban development patterns of the postwar era, Aurora’s tallest buildings are located along the I-225 corridor, largely either in the vicinity of the Parker Road interchange in the southwestern portion of the city, or near the Colfax Avenue interchange in the northwestern portion of the city, where a large medical services and research campus has emerged. In recent years, a number of hotel properties have also been built in Aurora along I-70 in the environs of Denver International Airport (DIA).

Parker Road / I-225
The area around Parker Road / I-225 saw the city’s first tall buildings rise during the early 1980s, when it was the nation’s fastest-growing city. These buildings could be considered as the eastern fringe of the Denver Tech Center, a concentration of office buildings and hotels along the I-25 freeway in neighboring Denver and Greenwood Village.

Anschutz Medical Campus
The city’s newest tall buildings rose in the early 2000s near Colfax Avenue / I-225 on the Anschutz Medical Campus, the former site of Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, whose main hospital building (Building 500) was Aurora’s tallest building for decades.

DIA Environs
Denver International Airport is located on land north of Aurora that was annexed to Denver, making much of Aurora more convenient to DIA than the developed portions of Denver. Indeed, all freeway traffic from DIA to central Denver passes through Aurora on I-70, and several hotels have been constructed in this corridor. A further access route to DIA from Aurora is provided by the E-470 beltway, and a proposed resort and conference center in this corridor may one day feature Aurora’s tallest building.

Proposed
Proposed new buildings in Aurora: