In 2016, Pasadena’s Planning Commission approved a Planned Development for the intersection of Colorado and Hill consisting of a 7-story, 335,000 square foot hotel on the north side of Colorado, and a 5-story residential development on the south side. Inheriting the massing of the project from Moule & Polyzoides, the San Diego firm ACRMA retained Goodale Architecture Planning in early 2022 to collaborate on the development of both buildings’ exterior architectural character, (plan refinements, building elevations, detailing, and materiality), and to assist in navigating the project through Pasadena’s Design Review Commission.

 

Influenced by the Art Deco character of Pasadena City College’s architecture, the original 2016 design character of both buildings leaned into a ziggeraut-style massing and relatively weighty expression of the Deco style.

 

For the hotel, the current design initiative elected to pursue the thread of Art Deco more commonly associated with commercial, urban architecture – exuberant verticality, rich materials, and energized linearity, (the latter shared with the mid-20th-century modernist auto showroom that will be adaptively re-used along the Colorado frontage). The hotel design is founded on a typical room bay of generous, vertically glazed windows opening on to zigzag French balcony rails, with tinted zinc shingles serving as the spandrel panels between floors. The hotel tower elements in the center, and at the intersection gateway to the city, will be more exuberantly clad and capped with extruded terra cotta.

 

The design of the residential component maintains the verticality, linearity, and material richness of the hotel, but in a more contemporary vein. Reprising the way that large residential projects address Colorado Boulevard further west at the Paseo, the building presents a rhythmic, formal frontage to the Boulevard, with a green-zinc-clad frontal bay. An aggressively indoor-outdoor building, all units will have French balconies. Terraces surround the Colorado and Holliston faces. And the Colorado-facing resident lounge will open to the Rose Parade with a folding glass wall. A cantilevered zinc eyebrow will cap the building and provide facade protection during mildly inclement weather.

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In separate Pasadena Design Review session, both the hotel project and the residential project have been approved for Concept Design.