CU Boulder Project Takes Top Honor

CENTERBROOK, Conn. – The new Center for Community at the University of Colorado at Boulder captured the top honor in Food Management Magazine’s annual awards, leading a field that included projects at Ohio State University and the U.S. House of Representatives.

The 320,000-square-foot complex, dubbed “C4C” in campus shorthand, opened last fall and is anchored by a 900-seat, street-market-style dining complex offering freshly prepared food in nine specialty dining stations, including sushi, Italian, Brazilian, and Persian dishes. The facility serves more than 4,000 meals a day and is the largest restaurant in the state.

The award citation states that the new C4C dining hall “employs a sophisticated use of space and design to create highly individualized dining environments and ambiances keyed to specific international food themes and station concepts. The menu development and culinary execution for these stations are also highly customized, yet efficient, in part due to well thought out central prep, production, and logistics strategies.”

C4C also houses all 12 student services offices, a commissary that supplies the other food outlets on campus, offices, and an underground parking garage for 375 cars. It is slated for LEED Gold.

Partner Jim Childress, FAIA, led a Centerbrook team that served as the project’s design architect and that collaborated with Davis Partnership Architects of Denver. The foodservice design was done by Baker Group of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Childress and Centerbrook were also the design architects for the Wolf Law School and the Health Sciences Library at the University of Colorado’s Boulder and Denver campuses respectively. Centerbrook and Davis have collaborated on five projects in the Colorado University system. Centerbrook has garnered 335 awards overall for its design work.