KL&A Ball Arena
In Denver, GENERATE Enables Large-Scale Mass Timber with KL&A Engineers & Builders
ZGF, courtesy Kroenke Sports & Entertainment
At 55 acres, the Ball Arena development project in downtown Denver is one of the largest nationally. For award-winning structural engineer KL&A, it’s an opportunity to build two major residential towers with mass timber structures. They chose GENERATE — once again — as a key partner on a speculative RFP and then quickly deliver competitive structural bids, real-world design options, and even automate a bill of materials and key details for three viable manufacturers.
Their story shows why GENERATE is quickly becoming a unique, stealthy advantage for empowering mass timber development — overcoming objections, speeding delivery, and controlling cost.
ZGF, courtesy Kroenke Sports & Entertainment
Opportunity
A 32-year-old, growing firm of 130 people, KL&A is a design firm that also takes on at-risk construction scope, taking on the mindset of the owner-builder — and often consulting directly to developers. In this case, stadium owner Kroenke Sports & Entertainment asked them to help achieve their vision: an exciting new Denver neighborhood, inspired by community engagement, transforming parking lots and disused sites over 30 years into a mixed-use district with a hotel, performance venue, two multifamily towers and parks.
Kroenke hired architects SAR+ and ZGF, who engaged KL&A on a competitive RFP with only two weeks to respond. Their ask? Make it possible to build the two apartment towers with timber structures to cut carbon and create natural appeal — and prove it’s competitive on cost and schedule against a post-tensioned concrete option.
KL&A knew the answer. “Our mantra for developer-driven projects aspiring to use mass timber is to dig into the why of using mass timber in the earliest conversations,” says John Jucha, S.E. of KL&A, lead engineer for Ball Arena’s first phase. “So we knew price and pro forma were going to be king.”
With a reputation for accurate structures modeling and costing, KL&A had worked with GENERATE on a dozen projects, so they knew they could accelerate the front-end. “It’s not easy to try designing with mass timber once you get pretty far into the process with concrete, and you’re already stacking parking and a residential grid,” says Jucha. “At that point it’s not apples-to-apples, and you lose interest in redesigning. So we had to quickly create an actionable path during pre-schematics.”
Why KL&A Chose GENERATE
This was a gap KL&A couldn’t close with traditional methods, such as their typical 2-D structural sketches; they needed full, optimized building models to succeed. But they had previously worked with GENERATE — including in its beta-testing — so they knew they could get Kroenke early cost clarity and sophisticated system comparisons at a speed that standard approaches can’t deliver.
Applying GENERATE to this early-phase pain point, “We could make a case for mass timber and deliver a presentation with high visual impact, which engineers are not usually known for,” says Jucha. “We also leverage its optioneering to ensure we lock in a competitive price with numbers we all believe in, based on delivering real-life custom materials by manufacturers ready to supply this project. That made a big difference in our interview.”
Jucha and his KL&A colleague, founder and director of R&D Greg Kingsley PhD, P.E., applied their decades of combined experience and engineering judgment to GENERATE’s optioneering output — interpreting, filtering, and acting on the best approach. “The structural engineer is essential, of course; they’re just faster now,” says Ethan Martin, director of projects for GENERATE. “Our mass timber expertise, automated into a generative optioneering platform, turns the A/E team’s concepts into optimized, quotable buildings in days, not months.”
Following that, KL&A handled the transition into the design documentation or DD phase, followed by structural system selection, and GC onboarding.
KL&A + Generate
Outcomes
GENERATE was a key enabler for KL&A to win the job, outcompeting other firms through a differentiated digital approach. GENERATE’s services helped KL&A resolve what are often considered “pain points,” says the engineer Jucha. “These issues are really opportunities to teach design teams and owners. We have processes in KL&A in how we approach those.” The key challenges include:
Maintaining “supplier agnosticism.”
Finding and addressing early-phase problems, which aren’t possible in traditional processes.
Ensuring competitiveness with other conventional systems throughout the design process.
Supporting design efficiency as the project evolves.
Kingsley, formerly the CEO of KL&A, adds that GENERATE helps their engineers address issues of cost or perceived cost among developers and investors who have less experience in mass timber. “If general contractors haven’t used mass timber in the past, they might pad their budgets to be safe,” he explains. “Mass timber is not a commodified material — every manufacturer is a little different: Some use cross-laminated timber, or CLT, while others prefer nail-lam, or dowel-lam, or glulam systems, and we know it’s good to have them all at the table, versus a traditional process where the systems are assumed to be commodified.”
“On top of that, if you bring our engineering teams in early, we can deliver significant value though our respected connections to the world of MT,” or mass timber, says Kingsley. “We’ve leveraged GENERATE to facilitate, heighten and speed that early interaction.”
Ball Arena has emerged as another success for this firm that’s been working with mass timber for over 25 years. “Mass timber has been a wonderful gamechanger for us,” says Jucha. “There is so much we can do in early phases, with optioneering, visualizing, and getting early-phase system details with current price insight. Compared with other more conventional project approaches, systems, we’ve had tremendous satisfaction in GENERATE’s ability to help us.”
KL&A + Generate