Best One-Stop Cop Shop

Built on the cheap for less than $7 million, the genius of the brand-new Brighton Police Department and Municipal Court building is the way its designers, Denver's Roth & Sheppard Architects, orchestrated ordinary materials into a chic, sophisticated whole. The masonry block they used is the kind of thing usually employed for a Wal-Mart, but here it was used to create a structure that both reflects the high-plains topography of this agricultural town (through its exaggerated horizontality) and is thoroughly contemporary at the same time (also because of its exaggerated horizontality). Brighton now lays claim to one of the finest neo-modernist works in the region.