The Geode Has Landed: Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum Opens

Bloomberg, September 21, 2006

The 146,000-square-foot addition to the Denver Art Museum that opens October 7 knifes through an ordinary city block at the edge of downtown in razor-edged shards and tilting rhomboids. Those crystalline shapes, lurching drunkenly from side to side and dangling menacingly above the passerby, have become the signature of architect Daniel Libeskind.

In Libeskind’s celebrated 1999 Jewish Museum in Berlin, they portended the tragic story told within. By recycling these forms in Denver’s museum, I feared they would lose their emotive power.

They haven’t - yet. Denver’s $110-million Frederic C. Hamilton Building is extraordinary, celebrating this young city’s idealism and aspiration. The building has the peculiarly magnetic power of a glowing geode produced by a crashed meteorite. Its folded planes in luminous matte titanium catch the sharp, high-altitude light, kaleidoscopically alternating deep shadows with shades of reflection.

Libeskind (working with local architect Davis Partnership) brings you in tight to the museum by using a five-story loft-condominium building of his own design to form a narrow pedestrian street. You are delightfully caught between baby appendages that bulge out of the condo and the lunging shapes of the museum. (If Libeskind had not intervened, proposing the condo, the museum would have faced a brutish 1,000-car parking garage. To their credit, city officials and the developers Corporex Colorado and Mile High Development signed on to wrap the garage in the fast-selling apartments, stores, and a hotel.)

The street frames a perspective that takes in the 1995 Central Library by Michael Graves (it has never looked better) and downtown towers beyond. It opens to a plaza that draws the Colorado History museum into the ensemble. Libeskind put a four-story-high prow on the Hamilton building that soars over 13th Avenue to point at the museum’s strange 1971 main building, the only American design by the Italian Gio Ponti.

Before Libeskind, no one knew how to pull these pieces of the city’s cultural nexus into a coherent ensemble.

He succeeds with the crowd-pleasing theatricality of a contemporary Bernini, even with far less promising raw material to begin with than the Baroque master had in 17th-century Rome. In Denver, it’s tragically clear just what New York has given up in trashing just about every life-enhancing element of Libeskind’s masterplan at Ground Zero.

A canyonlike atrium that opens to all four levels from the lobby carries the exterior’s sculptural gymnastics inside. A broad stair spirals up around a V-shaped pier that tilts as it splays upward; a huge column zooms across at a different angle to brace a rhomboid that looks like it would otherwise teeter into the atrium. Daylight from mostly hidden skylights overhead bands the space in ever-changing light and shadow. The spatial theatrics are dense, layered, and seem to operate in every direction at once and change with every step.

This building won’t resolve the heated debate about whether architecturally assertive buildings can display art well. Purists beware: you will not find great works hung in heroic isolation on classically proportioned expanses of wall. Instead Libeskind has divided the 53,000 square feet of new galleries into eight large volumes for curators to divide at will, with floor plans shaped as parallelograms or arrowheads. With sloping walls and acute corners, the aggressive shaping is not naturally welcoming to the display of art.

The staff at the museum has fearlessly tried to match the architectural inventiveness in the exhibition layouts. In the African galleries, vitrines at a variety of heights poke out of a Libeskindlike sculptural assemblage that displays artifacts at the center of the room, rather than around the edges. It helps dispel the dry ethnographic didacticism common to the display of what used to be called primitive art, yet does not add meaning.

In contrast to a lot of museums, Denver curators tend to install prints and paintings densely, on short stretches of wall, even attaching pieces to columns or relegating them to tight corners. (The curators are used to weird architecture. The Ponti building looks like an Italian medieval fortress imagined by a Surrealist.)

But trying to keep up with Libeskind deprives too many works of the visual breathing room they need. Sculptures fare better, because they can play off the slopes and angles.

The meandering paths the curators have made in Denver place the visitor in an appealingly informal and personal relationship with the art, however. “The building’s design sets up the idea that art is exploration,” explained Dan Kohl, the museum’s director of exhibit design, on a tour. This is a museum that’s fun to wander through and so it is likely to invite those intimidated by conventional museum formality. Low-key interpretive exhibits skillfully address art newbies.

The Hamilton building will never be an easy place to hang, but the best moments in the inaugural installations suggest that the museum will someday find a nice tension between art and architecture.

Denver took a big risk in hiring Libeskind two and a half years before his master plan for Ground Zero rocketed him to international fame. His architecture - and the gutsy installations - take a daring, can-do frontier culture into mountain-biking Denver’s big-city future.

For more information about the Denver Art Museum and its Frederic C. Hamilton Building: (1) (720) 865-5000 http://www.denverartmuseum.org