A New Civic Campus, Built in Colorado Wood.
City of Boulder | Western City Campus | Boulder, CO
Overview
The Boulder Civic West Campus is a mass timber expansion that transforms the former Boulder Community Health Hospital at the Alpine–Balsam site into a centralized, sustainable civic campus for the City of Boulder, consolidating previously dispersed departments into a single, efficient municipal hub. Designed by ZGF and delivered through a publicly bid process led by Saunders Construction, the project integrates a new mass timber addition with the existing structure, requiring partial demolition and extensive verification using as-built point cloud data to ensure precision and constructability. Timberlab was engaged to support the mass timber scope, collaborating closely with KL&A and the steel and timber installer to coordinate the hybrid structural system. The new construction introduces three mass timber wings extending from the existing building and capped with a CLT roof, reinforcing the project’s low-carbon and material-forward design intent. Central to the City’s vision was a commitment to Colorado-sourced wood and supply-chain transparency—an area where Timberlab brings deep experience—resulting in glulam comprised of approximately 35% tribally sourced material and CLT supplied by Smartlam incorporating roughly 45% Colorado-sourced fiber, aligning local forestry, tribal partnerships, and civic infrastructure in a single, highly visible public project.
Team
Architect | ZGF
Engineer | Anthem Engineers
GC | Saunders Construction
Mass Timber - Installation | KL&A | LPR
Mass Timber - Glulam | Timberlab
Mass Timber - CLT | Smartlam