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Alan Berney Fisher

Alan Berney Fisher (1905–78), the son of architect William E. Fisher, was an important modernist architect in twentieth-century Denver. Alan received early training in his father’s office before finishing his education at the University of…

Arthur Addison Fisher

Arthur Addison Fisher (1878–1965) worked with his older brother William Ellsworth Fisher in one of the largest and most influential architectural firms in the Rocky Mountain region. Arthur brought to the firm an interest in Spanish and Mediterranean…

August Meyer

August Robert Meyer (1851–1905) was a mining engineer who played a central role in starting Leadville’s silver boom in the late 1870s. Meyer recognized the value of the area’s lead carbonate ores, built a smelter, developed local infrastructure, and…

Bulkeley Wells

Bulkeley Wells (1872–1931) was an influential mining investor and hydroelectric engineer best known for building the Smuggler-Union Hydroelectric Power Plant near Telluride and for his hostility toward unions. A controversial figure in Colorado history,…

Burnham Hoyt

Colorado’s most notable architect, Burnham “Bernie” Hoyt (1887–1960) designed eighty-five major constructed projects in a variety of styles, ranging from a fifteenth-century Scottish castle (Cherokee Castle, 1926) in Sedalia to the radically modern…

Charles Deaton

Charles Deaton was an influential western American architect best known for his Sculptured House (better known as the Sleeper House) in the hills around Denver. Deaton is remembered as a pioneering Colorado artist whose work was an example of…

David Owen Tryba

David Owen Tryba (1955–) is a prominent and prolific Denver architect known for designing the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building, the Union Station renovation, and the History Colorado Center as well as the Google campus in Boulder. He has…

Frank E. Edbrooke

Frank E. Edbrooke (1841–1921), Colorado’s best-known and most-celebrated architect, designed more than seventy buildings, including many now-landmarked structures that helped define Denver’s built environment. He gave the city its first fine commercial…

Gray Goose Airways

Denver’s history is full of innovation and success associated with the emergence of air travel, but perhaps just as many ventures failed. Though Gray Goose Airways was ultimately unsuccessful, founder Jonathan Edward Caldwell was doggedly persistent in…

Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer (1900–85) was an artist, architect, and designer best known in Colorado for his work in Aspen during the decades after World War II. Born in Austria and trained at the Bauhaus, Bayer brought to the United States a modernist belief in simple…

Jesse Nusbaum

Jesse Nusbaum (1887–1975) was an early National Park Service (NPS) employee, historian, archaeologist, restoration specialist, and author active in Colorado and New Mexico in the early 1900s. As superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park, he imbued the…

Jules Jacques Benois Benedict

Jacques Benedict (1879–1948), one of Colorado’s best-known and most-flamboyant architects, designed some of Colorado’s grandest Beaux Arts city homes and rustic mountain residences, as well as notable churches, libraries, schools, a town hall, shelters…

Otto Mears

Otto Mears (1840–1931) was a Colorado businessman who played a key role in the removal of the Nuche (Ute) people and is best known for building more than 450 miles of toll roads and railroads on the Utes’ former lands in the southern and…

Robert S. Roeschlaub

Robert Roeschlaub (1843–1923) was Colorado’s first officially licensed architect, working in Denver during the early settlement era. Roeschlaub played a central role in defining the city’s building code, which has affected the development of Denver’s…

Roger Wolcott Toll

Roger Wolcott Toll (1883–1936) was a mountaineer, author, and early employee of the National Park Service (NPS), serving as superintendent of Mt. Rainier, Rocky Mountain, and Yellowstone National Parks before his untimely death in a car accident in 1936…

Saco Rienk DeBoer

Saco Rienk DeBoer (1883–1974) was a prolific Denver-based landscape architect and city planner in the early twentieth century. DeBoer played a significant role in the development of Denver’s built environment, particularly the city’s parks and the…

Temple Hoyne Buell

Temple Hoyne Buell (1895–1990) was a leading Colorado architect, developer, socialite, and philanthropist from 1923 to 1990. By 1940, he headed the largest architectural firm in the Rocky Mountain region. A tall, handsome bon vivant noted for his wit,…

William A. Lang

William A. Lang (1846–97), one of Colorado’s premier residential architects, practiced in Denver between 1887 and 1895, both individually and in the firm of Lang and Pugh. During that period, Lang designed some 250 buildings and made a name for himself…

William Fisher

William Ellsworth Fisher (1871–1937) headed one of the largest and most influential architectural firms in the Rocky Mountain region. Working most notably with his younger brother, Arthur Addison Fisher, he designed many elaborate houses for the wealthy,…

William “Cement Bill” Williams

William “Cement Bill” Williams (1868–1945) was a prominent contractor, political agitator, and personality in Golden during the early 1900s. Williams’s tireless campaigning brought crucial road construction to Golden, much of which he built himself…