An empty downtown Denver skyscraper, once filled with corporate bros and cubicles, has become an unlikely playground for artists. 

The vacant 17th Street office towers were purchased by Asher Luzzatto with the goal of transforming the buildings into a “vertical village” – a collection of housing, retail and amenities. While the ambitious project has yet to commence, curators Julie Davis and Jenna Miles are already breathing life into the empty space. 

Following the success of their event Sound/ Sight / Space, which drew roughly 500 people to the 30th floor of High Fidelity Plaza, Davis and Miles are back with a new event: To Gladden the Heart, “a one-night immersive convergence of music, performance art, and botanical ritual celebrating the summer solstice.” 

What better way to fill a vacant high-rise than with pagan ritual and herbal sacrament? 

While downtown is far from a ghost town, the post-pandemic office market collapse and switch to remote work left behind many graves. With nearly 40% of its downtown offices vacant at the end of 2025, the city is adapting to the dying demand of traditional office space use. 

For Davis and Miles, events like To Gladden the Heart offer a way to rebuild meaning inside Denver’s vacant urban core through art and community.

“The space is pretty apocalyptic. It feels sort of perfect for art,” said Davis, singer, songwriter and frontwoman of Bluebook. “It feels a little subversive to be up there at all. As artists and creators, we’re not supposed to be there. The whole thing feels pretty punk rock.”

The empty 30th floor wasn’t Davis’ first choice for a solstice celebration. She originally imagined corralling people into a grove of pines. But the gutted, barren office floor has come to represent what Miles calls “an urban solstice.”

“It’s us reclaiming this corporate space and bringing it into a more organic, less harsh and businesslike space,” said Miles, an art historian with Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Center for Visual Art. “We’re transforming it. We’re imbuing art and culture and community into it.”

For Davis, the joy and anticipation we once felt as children as summer approached can feel unattainable. Honoring the changing seasons, she plans to use mythology and plant medicine to rekindle that joy. 

The event begins in the courtyard below with a theatrical ritual performed by The Practicing Body, symbolizing the descent and return of ancient goddesses. Guests will be offered a homemade lemon balm tincture inspired by 14th-century Carmelite Water, traditionally believed to “gladden the heart.” 

The solstice event is built upon paradox: light to dark, descent to ascent, corporate to expressive, urban to natural. Following the opening ritual, attendees will physically and symbolically ascend to the 30th floor for a soundscape performance by M O R S KA and a bodymind building experience.

Throughout the night, Crip Collective members, Jaimie Henthorn, MG Bernard, and Regan Linton, will serve as “cyborgorian guides,” moving through the vast interior space while animating extensions of the bodymind. Henthorn’s work often plays with the relationship between the human body and architectural spaces, a theme that echoes throughout the evening.

Davis and her husband, Joseph Pope III, operate the project space through their company Division of Labor under the name Human Resources, a title that poses a central question: “How can we lean into the human in order to make this a living project?”

“What can we do as bodies even in this strange situation of being human right now?” Davis said. What can these vacant spaces become, and how can art inform that?

The event will conclude with a closing rite and solo set by Davis, but both organizers see the work as part of a larger experiment.

“I always see how artists and musicians come into vacant places and sort of recharge them,” said Miles. But she warns that in order for that transition to last, art must be central to the process, not just as an add-on.

Luzzatto, Davis noted, is an artist and musician himself.

“He understands the importance of art at the center of culture and the center of this movement,” she said.

By lending Julie and her husband this space, Davis feels he is reinforcing the larger idea: that any effort to reimagine downtown Denver must come through its artists.

“If it doesn’t,” she said, “then it’s just going to be another hollow building.”