Presented as part of the 2013 Biennial of the Americas Festival Draft Urbanism, Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s Mine Pavilion was a large-scale architectural installation located between downtown Denver and the Auraria Campus. The Festival invited artists and architects to create temporary urban prototypes that explored new possibilities for development, public space, and the city’s built environment.
With its simple, tapering form, Mine Pavilion held multiple identities at once: a billboard for drivers along Speer Boulevard, a tunnel for pedestrians, a tower in scale, a bridge in position, and a mining structure through its beetle kill pine facade and material language. The work referenced the site’s layered history, including Denver’s origins as a gold prospectors’ settlement in 1858, while responding to the physical and symbolic divide between Auraria and downtown. Rather than simply moving people across the gap, Mine Pavilion occupied it, transforming the median into a place of pause, connection, and renewed urban possibility.
