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Here is a great article on Libeskind's Denver project - which is almost an exact duplicate of our ROM addition. In fact, much of this piece could easily be a future review of the ROM addition.
MILE-HIGH
by PAUL GOLDBERGER
After the World Trade Center furor, Daniel Libeskind moves on.
Issue of 2006-08-28
Posted 2006-08-21
Daniel Libeskind’s architectural career has had an unusual trajectory. He went from being a theoretician whose highly academic designs were so obscure that most people couldn’t understand them to being a celebrity architect whose work is dismissed by many of his peers as too crowd-pleasing. The transformation began with the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which he designed less as a home for artifacts than as a de-facto Holocaust memorial, using architecture to produce a sense of discomfort. The building, which opened in 2001, drew well over half a million visitors a year, and Libeskind discovered the allure of popular acclaim. When he won the competition to design a master plan for the reconstruction of the site of the World Trade Center, in 2003, he cloaked his familiar angular shapes in patriotic rhetoric. But, as reconstruction has moved forward, his plan has been compromised almost out of existence, and his continued attempts to claim ownership of the project have sometimes made him a figure of fun in the press. All the buildings at Ground Zero have been assigned to other architects, and very few of Libeskind’s ideas will be visible.
In Denver, however, Libeskind’s ideas are becoming very visible indeed. His new building for the Denver Art Museum, which opens this fall, is his first American work to be completed. It’s already so popular in Denver that Libeskind was invited to construct a pair of condominium buildings and a hotel next door, and to design a neighborhood plan for a “cultural district†surrounding the museum. Marketed as the creations of “world renowned architect Daniel Libeskindâ€â€”whose face is all over the brochures—the apartments are among the highest-priced condos in town. Such success is a reminder of the fact that second-tier American cities have often proved more willing to take architectural risks than supposedly sophisticated cities like New York. In giving Libeskind the freedom denied him in New York, Denver is taking a risk: Does Libeskind have the ability to design a building that will exert the magnetic pull of an icon and still work well as a museum? And can he set out a plan for an entire neighborhood, as he tried to do in New York? Libeskind’s new Denver Art Museum is an eruption of hard-edged rhomboids that suggests gargantuan quartz crystals. This is a bold building, and it is neither an inaccessible theoretical work nor a brazen piece of entertainment, but somewhere in between.
The building, officially called the Frederic C. Hamilton Building, is technically an addition to an eccentric structure by Gio Ponti, an Italian architect best known for designing the Pirelli Tower, in Milan. Ponti’s museum is a forbidding, fortress-like block, clad in a million triangular tiles of reflective gray glass, with what looks like castellation along the top. The only Ponti design that ever got built in America, it’s an earlier example of Denver’s adventurousness, but when it opened, in 1971, not everyone was pleased: it was described as “an Italian castle wrapped in aluminum foil.†Ponti’s building is an all but impossible structure to add to, so Libeskind didn’t really try. He just did his own thing next door, juxtaposing his crystalline forms with Ponti’s sternly rectilinear style. The two buildings are connected by a glass-covered bridge across the street that separates them. The bridge itself is somewhat perfunctory, but above it Libeskind daringly extends one triangle of the building over the road like the prow of a ship. An origami fold, blown up to monumental scale, the prow is a powerful gesture: its point seems aimed directly at Ponti’s building, a colossal siege engine set to storm the castle.
The Libeskind addition is sheathed in more than nine thousand titanium panels, which are not completely flat, so that as the light bounces off them they seem to ripple gently, as if the building were covered with a thin film of liquid. Since none of the exterior walls are perpendicular to the ground and each surface slopes at a different angle, at any moment the sun strikes each of them differently, making some sections seem richly textured while others appear to have no texture at all.
As a purely sculptural feat, this building is a thrilling affirmation of the idea that museums can be art works as well as merely containers. It is also willful and arbitrary, and wildly self-indulgent. Some people will praise Libeskind for creating the most exciting place in downtown Denver since the exuberant Gilded Age atrium in the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel, and others will denounce him for creating a building that appears to put an architect’s love of certain shapes above any commitment to the functions that a museum is supposed to serve. They will both be right.
How do you display art in such a building? Not easily, and not entirely successfully, but a lot better than you might expect. Like Frank Lloyd Wright at the Guggenheim, Libeskind has designed a building that never recedes into the background but that is surprisingly sympathetic to certain kinds of art. His angular spaces—in which walls slope inward or outward, many ceilings are raked, and every corner becomes a slanting line—are full of energy, which may be why they work best with big contemporary works. In the largest of the temporary exhibition galleries, the architect’s determination to ignore conventional notions of rooms and galleries seems to make common cause with bold, large-scale works by artists like Damien Hirst, Matthew Richie, and Takashi Murakami. Elsewhere, Libeskind’s design makes for bizarre challenges: a wall that slopes away, like the side of a pyramid, has been used to display textiles—the effect is winning, if faintly reminiscent of a fashion boutique—and, in another gallery, a huge striped painting by Gene Davis is hung from a wall that slopes the other way. The canvas dangles in space as the wall recedes behind it.
But most of Libeskind’s walls are empty, since there really isn’t much to be done with them. The task of making surfaces that you can actually hang paintings on has gone, instead, to Daniel Kohl, the museum’s installation designer. Kohl has created interior partitions that zig and zag in a way that recalls Libeskind’s angles but never directly mimics them; they are often painted in muted colors—plum, yellow, mossy green—to differentiate them from the white of Libeskind’s, so that there is no uncertainty about who did what. To the extent that Libeskind’s building is workable as a museum, it is Kohl who has made it so.
Much of the building’s interior matches the visual drama of the exterior. Libeskind’s spectacular atrium contains a characteristically odd version of the traditional grand staircase. His stairs ascend in a jagged, irregular corkscrew, like something out of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.†This produces a sense of vertiginous complexity, which is accentuated by the fact that the wall against which the staircase is set slopes away from you. The climactic point of Libeskind’s composition comes on the sculpture terraces that are tucked under the prow, where the square forms of a large Donald Judd piece play off perfectly against Libeskind’s angles, and the architect’s sloping walls create an outdoor room that seems to engage all of downtown Denver. At moments like this, Libeskind’s assertiveness comes off not as bombastic but as masterly, and the museum convinces you that complaints about form not following function are beside the point.
But for every one of Libeskind’s spaces that feel exultant there is another that is deeply disquieting. Many of the first galleries you see are so awkwardly shaped that they leave you feeling only uneasiness. Does it really make sense to have a gallery with a floor plan that is bent like the letter “L,†slanting walls, and a ceiling that is eight feet high at one end and slopes sharply up to thirty-four feet at the other? It’s not just that it’s hard to show art in here; it isn’t pleasant to be in a room like this when it’s empty. As for the museum’s celebrated collection of art from the American West, unlike the brash contemporary works that thrive in Libeskind’s unconventional rooms, these pieces look forlorn and out of place.
In the neighboring condominiums, now nearing completion, Libeskind has reined himself in. The buildings are long and low, and are clearly intended to defer to the museum: the cloisters to Libeskind’s cathedral. Almost all the internal walls here run perpendicular to the ground, and the exterior has fairly standard glass-curtain walls, interrupted every so often by trapezoidal projections that look as if a piece of the museum had spun off and lodged there. Libeskind has figured out how to get beyond the standard box without making spaces that feel intractable; the rooms aren’t square, but let’s just say that you can put furniture into them a lot more easily than you can install paintings in the museum across the way. George Thorn, a developer who worked with the museum and others to erect the condominiums, says that the units that sold most easily were not the ones that offer a distant view of the Rockies, as is usually the case with Denver real estate, but the ones that face the museum. It’s easy to see why. Many of these places have big windows that look right into the side of Libeskind’s crystalline shards, a mere fifty feet away. Perhaps this view is what Libeskind had in mind all along. From there, the museum no longer feels like a piece of architecture. It is more like an enormous titanium sculpture that was created to decorate your living room.
MILE-HIGH
by PAUL GOLDBERGER
After the World Trade Center furor, Daniel Libeskind moves on.
Issue of 2006-08-28
Posted 2006-08-21
Daniel Libeskind’s architectural career has had an unusual trajectory. He went from being a theoretician whose highly academic designs were so obscure that most people couldn’t understand them to being a celebrity architect whose work is dismissed by many of his peers as too crowd-pleasing. The transformation began with the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which he designed less as a home for artifacts than as a de-facto Holocaust memorial, using architecture to produce a sense of discomfort. The building, which opened in 2001, drew well over half a million visitors a year, and Libeskind discovered the allure of popular acclaim. When he won the competition to design a master plan for the reconstruction of the site of the World Trade Center, in 2003, he cloaked his familiar angular shapes in patriotic rhetoric. But, as reconstruction has moved forward, his plan has been compromised almost out of existence, and his continued attempts to claim ownership of the project have sometimes made him a figure of fun in the press. All the buildings at Ground Zero have been assigned to other architects, and very few of Libeskind’s ideas will be visible.
In Denver, however, Libeskind’s ideas are becoming very visible indeed. His new building for the Denver Art Museum, which opens this fall, is his first American work to be completed. It’s already so popular in Denver that Libeskind was invited to construct a pair of condominium buildings and a hotel next door, and to design a neighborhood plan for a “cultural district†surrounding the museum. Marketed as the creations of “world renowned architect Daniel Libeskindâ€â€”whose face is all over the brochures—the apartments are among the highest-priced condos in town. Such success is a reminder of the fact that second-tier American cities have often proved more willing to take architectural risks than supposedly sophisticated cities like New York. In giving Libeskind the freedom denied him in New York, Denver is taking a risk: Does Libeskind have the ability to design a building that will exert the magnetic pull of an icon and still work well as a museum? And can he set out a plan for an entire neighborhood, as he tried to do in New York? Libeskind’s new Denver Art Museum is an eruption of hard-edged rhomboids that suggests gargantuan quartz crystals. This is a bold building, and it is neither an inaccessible theoretical work nor a brazen piece of entertainment, but somewhere in between.
The building, officially called the Frederic C. Hamilton Building, is technically an addition to an eccentric structure by Gio Ponti, an Italian architect best known for designing the Pirelli Tower, in Milan. Ponti’s museum is a forbidding, fortress-like block, clad in a million triangular tiles of reflective gray glass, with what looks like castellation along the top. The only Ponti design that ever got built in America, it’s an earlier example of Denver’s adventurousness, but when it opened, in 1971, not everyone was pleased: it was described as “an Italian castle wrapped in aluminum foil.†Ponti’s building is an all but impossible structure to add to, so Libeskind didn’t really try. He just did his own thing next door, juxtaposing his crystalline forms with Ponti’s sternly rectilinear style. The two buildings are connected by a glass-covered bridge across the street that separates them. The bridge itself is somewhat perfunctory, but above it Libeskind daringly extends one triangle of the building over the road like the prow of a ship. An origami fold, blown up to monumental scale, the prow is a powerful gesture: its point seems aimed directly at Ponti’s building, a colossal siege engine set to storm the castle.
The Libeskind addition is sheathed in more than nine thousand titanium panels, which are not completely flat, so that as the light bounces off them they seem to ripple gently, as if the building were covered with a thin film of liquid. Since none of the exterior walls are perpendicular to the ground and each surface slopes at a different angle, at any moment the sun strikes each of them differently, making some sections seem richly textured while others appear to have no texture at all.
As a purely sculptural feat, this building is a thrilling affirmation of the idea that museums can be art works as well as merely containers. It is also willful and arbitrary, and wildly self-indulgent. Some people will praise Libeskind for creating the most exciting place in downtown Denver since the exuberant Gilded Age atrium in the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel, and others will denounce him for creating a building that appears to put an architect’s love of certain shapes above any commitment to the functions that a museum is supposed to serve. They will both be right.
How do you display art in such a building? Not easily, and not entirely successfully, but a lot better than you might expect. Like Frank Lloyd Wright at the Guggenheim, Libeskind has designed a building that never recedes into the background but that is surprisingly sympathetic to certain kinds of art. His angular spaces—in which walls slope inward or outward, many ceilings are raked, and every corner becomes a slanting line—are full of energy, which may be why they work best with big contemporary works. In the largest of the temporary exhibition galleries, the architect’s determination to ignore conventional notions of rooms and galleries seems to make common cause with bold, large-scale works by artists like Damien Hirst, Matthew Richie, and Takashi Murakami. Elsewhere, Libeskind’s design makes for bizarre challenges: a wall that slopes away, like the side of a pyramid, has been used to display textiles—the effect is winning, if faintly reminiscent of a fashion boutique—and, in another gallery, a huge striped painting by Gene Davis is hung from a wall that slopes the other way. The canvas dangles in space as the wall recedes behind it.
But most of Libeskind’s walls are empty, since there really isn’t much to be done with them. The task of making surfaces that you can actually hang paintings on has gone, instead, to Daniel Kohl, the museum’s installation designer. Kohl has created interior partitions that zig and zag in a way that recalls Libeskind’s angles but never directly mimics them; they are often painted in muted colors—plum, yellow, mossy green—to differentiate them from the white of Libeskind’s, so that there is no uncertainty about who did what. To the extent that Libeskind’s building is workable as a museum, it is Kohl who has made it so.
Much of the building’s interior matches the visual drama of the exterior. Libeskind’s spectacular atrium contains a characteristically odd version of the traditional grand staircase. His stairs ascend in a jagged, irregular corkscrew, like something out of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.†This produces a sense of vertiginous complexity, which is accentuated by the fact that the wall against which the staircase is set slopes away from you. The climactic point of Libeskind’s composition comes on the sculpture terraces that are tucked under the prow, where the square forms of a large Donald Judd piece play off perfectly against Libeskind’s angles, and the architect’s sloping walls create an outdoor room that seems to engage all of downtown Denver. At moments like this, Libeskind’s assertiveness comes off not as bombastic but as masterly, and the museum convinces you that complaints about form not following function are beside the point.
But for every one of Libeskind’s spaces that feel exultant there is another that is deeply disquieting. Many of the first galleries you see are so awkwardly shaped that they leave you feeling only uneasiness. Does it really make sense to have a gallery with a floor plan that is bent like the letter “L,†slanting walls, and a ceiling that is eight feet high at one end and slopes sharply up to thirty-four feet at the other? It’s not just that it’s hard to show art in here; it isn’t pleasant to be in a room like this when it’s empty. As for the museum’s celebrated collection of art from the American West, unlike the brash contemporary works that thrive in Libeskind’s unconventional rooms, these pieces look forlorn and out of place.
In the neighboring condominiums, now nearing completion, Libeskind has reined himself in. The buildings are long and low, and are clearly intended to defer to the museum: the cloisters to Libeskind’s cathedral. Almost all the internal walls here run perpendicular to the ground, and the exterior has fairly standard glass-curtain walls, interrupted every so often by trapezoidal projections that look as if a piece of the museum had spun off and lodged there. Libeskind has figured out how to get beyond the standard box without making spaces that feel intractable; the rooms aren’t square, but let’s just say that you can put furniture into them a lot more easily than you can install paintings in the museum across the way. George Thorn, a developer who worked with the museum and others to erect the condominiums, says that the units that sold most easily were not the ones that offer a distant view of the Rockies, as is usually the case with Denver real estate, but the ones that face the museum. It’s easy to see why. Many of these places have big windows that look right into the side of Libeskind’s crystalline shards, a mere fifty feet away. Perhaps this view is what Libeskind had in mind all along. From there, the museum no longer feels like a piece of architecture. It is more like an enormous titanium sculpture that was created to decorate your living room.