Changing spaces: get out of the cube and into the workplaces of the future.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: [who owns] COLORADO

Offices haven't changed so much over the years. True, few contain roll-top desks and feather quill pens anymore, but so what?

Most all of us still work at desks with our recording implements and communications devices at hand and one eye over our shoulders. Office space remains arranged hierarchically: Ownership and upper-tier employees get privacy, the corner office and the mountain views.

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But something new in workspaces is taking hold around the Front Range, such as new workplace pioneer Mickey Zeppelin's TAXI development in River North, RiNO, that is; or Andrew Luter's brainchild the Hive Cooperative; or Jennie Nevin's Green Spaces, coworking at the other end of RiNO by the Ballpark neighborhood, award winner for its Green Route map and producer of the glitzy Green Route Festival in late August.

Breathless yet?

How about Boulder's The Candy Shop, home of the Boulder Green Building Guild, Sustainably Built, Origin Graphic Design, Caught in Her Dress, Keira Ritter Design, Zen Ohm, Daedalus Studio, the Automatic Company and more?

Or Fort Collins' Cohere, Colorado Springs' Enclave, or ID345 in Denver, or YesPleaseMore Denver Pavilions where entrepreneurs Brian Corrigan and Samuel Schimek promise coworking for artists, or the Vault in Louisville, born from the expanding circle of the DaVinci Institute?

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So what is the New Workplace? What is "coworking?" Is it really catching on in Colorado?

Coworking can mean lots of things, but it has something to do with entrepreneurs working together in a common space, often in the absence of authority figures, to boot.

Ryan Cross, Web developer and curator of the recently opened Enclave Cooperative in Colorado Springs explains that, "The purpose behind coworking is about the thought of mindshare. It's the idea that I as a Web developer might not be awesome in (Adobe) Photoshop, and if I need to learn a certain technique I might just lean over to the guy next to me and say, 'Hey, do you have a second?'"

Here, it could be the whole trend kicked off with TAXI 1, the 30,000-square-foot former Yellow Cab headquarters that in 2001 Zeppelin turned into an architecturally friendly, casually avant-garde space with a walkway meandering down the middle and a spacious spot called the Fuel Cafe.

"We call it the New Workplace," Zeppelin says.

"When we opened TAXI, the opening ceremony was, we blew up a cubicle. We did that because we saw the end of that era--the Era of the...