Margaret Felix, an architect who was hired to design the site of downtown Fort Collins, was hired for a larger job. She came from a firm that brought with it a firm of industrial designers. Her first assignment was to redesign Fort Collins’s mall, the National Fort Collins Museum. It was a very short design that had it in the mid-1950s, but, as a result, all of the architectural elements for the mall were inspired by the architecture of the National Mall.

Felix then went on to redesign the downtown campus of CSU. To this day, the campus and university look an awful lot like the mall, though the mall had all the elements of a campus campus. The first project that Felix had with the university was actually on the Fort Collins Mall site. Felix had the campus built on its own. The university would have a new building on the Mall, but that’s another story.

Felix: With the library on site, it seemed to me the campus library could be built within that one building. So I came to the conclusion that, just as we were setting the Mall up to be a campus campus, the library should be on site, just as it is today.

Hoff: She did a great job of getting it, you know, on time, on budget, and just everything on time.

Felix: And as with the Mall, Fort Collins Mall had a wonderful aesthetic and could be a very striking building when it was finished. And it is indeed today.

Felix: My feeling is, and this was actually my first major project in Fort Collins, even this big new project – the mall was not going to be done during my first year. But I would say, “Well, that’s okay,” because by the time I got here, that whole Mall had been built.

Felix: And then our very first project was looking at improving the street grid system inside the central campus. We figured that a little more parking would be needed – if that were a requirement, I think I’ve always been like…

Hoff: My biggest question would be, for an architect, this is what does that mean to you? Do you create more parking? Or do you make it simpler for residents to plan routes?

Felix: Well, for the residents of downtown Fort Collins, it was like they thought they needed something special.

Felix: This