This is one of my favorite historic churches in Denver: Central Presbyterian Church, built in 1892. It was designed by Frank E. Edbrooke, one of Denver's most prominent 19th century architects. The architectural style is Richardsonian Romanesque with a bit of Gothic influence. The building is made of native red-orange Colorado sandstone.
Most of the building feels heavy and weighty, like a carved mass, with solid walls and broad arches framed in thick bands of stone. And then you get to the belfry, where this feeling is flipped. The twelve narrow openings in the belfry—grouped in threes on each face—defy this sense of heaviness. Are those twelve windows punched into a solid wall, or are those twelve slender piers holding up the spire over an open chamber?
To me, it feels more like the latter. The vertical piers read almost as columns, as if the tower's crown were a hollow lantern resting on a colonnade. For a building that feels so solid and anchored, the belfry is light and permeable, with a void-to-solid ratio that sets it apart from the rest of the building.
And from this angle we can see the thin spiral staircase that winds its way up through the open chamber, a subtle architectural pleasure, a delicate spine inside a masonry skeleton.
February 2026 | Denver, USA
#architecture #richardsonianromanesque #church #historicarchitecture #belfry #belfrytower #sandstone #colorado #denver #urbandesign #urbanexploration #urbanphotography
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