A Center of One’s Own
Women architects create a unique college building

by Melissa Baldridge

When architects Jane Loefgren, Linda Wagner and Martha Bennett brainstormed about what form The Merle Catherine Chambers Center for the Advancement of Women at the University of Denver should take, they thought first about who would actually be using the building most.

“How do women use buildings differently?” Bennett wondered. “Architecture is often asexual. How do women naturally operate?”

Photo: Matt Suby at the University of Denver

The archetypal 20th-century campus women’s center was a casual corner in a random university building, housing a few offices, a library and a meeting room. The Chambers Center infuses the archetype with 21st-century resources and vision, along with sophisticated, woman-centered design.

The architects wanted to create a safe “home” for the nontraditional, multigenerational students of The Women’s College, one of the Center’s three major tenants. To that end, they loaded the building — whose classic exterior is modeled after the church of Santo Spirito in Florence — with such comforts as a fireplace, gardens, art display niches and a dramatic 12-foot-tall amber glass oculus with a “chambered nautilus” theme.

Designers also wanted to encourage networking among students and synergy among tenants, so they eliminated many interior walls to foster collaboration (and let in the abundant Colorado sunshine).

The three major tenants — the other two are The Women’s Foundation of Colorado, which promotes women’s economic self-sufficiency, and Higher Education Resource Services (HERS), Mid-America, which works to better professional opportunities for women in academia — share common conference rooms, workrooms, bathrooms and kitchens.

“We wanted them to reinforce each others’ missions, and the only way to do that was to have them interact with each other,” says Loefgren.

Female-friendly design, the architects point out, is about a whole lot more than just adding stalls in women’s bathrooms.

“The building has apse forms, shapely, abstracted caryatids,” says Bennett. “The softening of forms was intentional. It’s more relaxed. … Every space was used, even window seats on landings, so women can stop and have conversations.”

The Chambers Center, which opened this September, offered a chance for women to strut their stuff in nearly every aspect of its creation, not just design. A woman-owned firm provided the construction drawings, a woman served as construction site manager, and most of the donors — including the major contributor — are women.

“A lot of people had never given to bricks and mortar; a lot were excited to have their name on something,” recalls Michele “Mike” Bloom, dean of The Women’s College. “They were giving in their own name for the first time, [whereas before] perhaps their husbands or foundations had given and they’d used their married names.”

Lead donor Merle Chambers — a lawyer and businesswoman who has built on both her father’s success in the oil business and her mother’s philanthropic bent — sees limitless opportunities.

We don’t know how the people involved will spark off of each other, make use of the opportunities, find themselves. And because we don’t know, that’s so exciting!”