DENVER-
Architect Daniel Libeskind has upstaged the Rockies with his new wing of the Denver Art Museum, as jagged as the nearby peaks that inspired it.
New condominiums facing the museum sold faster than units with mountain views, something developer George Thorn had never seen in his 35 years in the business. The homes were built as part of the museum project and some are almost close enough to reach out and touch.
“It looks like the Titanic is about to run over you,” Thorn said. The most expensive units go for $1.5 million.
And with Libeskind’s contribution, the area has become paradise for lovers of architecture.
“Where else can you see buildings by Ponti, Libeskind and Graves out your window?” Thorn asked.
Gio Ponti designed the existing castlelike museum, completed in 1971, and Michael Graves fashioned the seven-story Denver Public Library, which musters together squares, towers and cylinders in Western desert colors and opened in 1995. All three are within 100 yards of each other.
“I was inspired by the mountains. But at the same time I wanted to create a linkage, a conversation, a dialogue between the buildings,” said Libeskind, who recalled living in Milan, Italy, next to Ponti’s Pirelli Tower, and seeing his Denver museum on the cover of a magazine. “I thought it was amazing.”
Sculptor Louise Bourgeois’ famed 11-foot-high spider sits next to the museum’s doors.
The soaring titanium-clad Libeskind wing, which opens Saturday, has already helped the museum negotiate its first-ever traveling exhibition from the Louvre Museum.
“We’ve never been able to have a relationship with a museum as large and as important as the Louvre,” said Lewis Sharp, Denver museum director. “Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures From the Louvre” will be on view from Oct. 6, 2007-to Jan. 6, 2008. It will include sculptures, antiquities, paintings and drawings by Rubens, Titian, Velasquez and Durer, as well as decorative arts and porcelain.
In museum circles it is called the Bilbao Effect–that a museum’s building is as important as its collection–a reference to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, often called Frank Gehry’s masterwork.
But Denver had been taking chances long before Gehry’s building was completed in 1997. Ponti’s building shocked many, and remains controversial. Denver International Airport’s teepeelike structure opened to ridicule in 1995. The new library opened the same year and some people still shake their heads when they see it for the first time.
Still, said Sharp, “Great art looks great no matter where you put it. That doesn’t mean you cannot create an environment that it will look better in and will engage people.”
He said that curators are no longer content to put their collections in rectangular or square boxes.
A glass walkway connects the two museum wings. Libeskind’s wing rises from two stories to four as it moves from south to north. From a different angle it can look like an unfolded fan of shards.
Most of the art works aren’t hanging on “Daniel’s walls,” as the staff calls the interior walls, suspended from the ceiling or projected from the slope in some other way so they don’t require the viewer to stand on tip toes or bend over to see it in its proper perspective.
There’s none of the intended disorientation of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin.
“There are no bizarre things here,” Daniel Kohl, the museum’s interior designer, said. “It is a very classical museum. It is serene. We asked Daniel to give us large spaces that we can tailor over the years.”
Kohl built moveable interior walls that can be reconfigured as needed. The walls are all white and floors black Douglas fir hardwood.
“I think there is a place for color in galleries. We certainly will be adding more color to the Libeskind building as we go forward. It is such a bold building that we wanted to begin the building celebrating the architecture,” said Sharp.
There was a compelling need for more room. The Ponti building was built before traveling exhibitions became popular, and lacked the necessary amenities and space. In some cases the museum had to be closed while exhibitions were installed.
Now, with the $67 million project, it has 22,000 feet available of easily accessible space, enough room to handle any exhibition that has toured the nation in the past decade, Sharp said.
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