This article was originally published in The Denver Post on July 9, 2000.
It may be one of the most architecturally challenging sites
in the world.
The new $62.5 million addition to the Denver Art Museum will
have as its neighbors buildings by two of the world’s most
celebrated contemporary architects: the 1971 museum, whose
dramatic, multifaceted silhouette was designed by the renowned
Italian Gio Ponti, and the 1995 Denver Public Library addition,
designed by internationally famed Michael Graves of Princeton,
N.J., to enlarge the 1956 International-style library designed by
Denver architect Burnham Hoyt.
The new building, and a 1,000-car parking structure, will go
on three-quarters of a block: Acoma Street from 12th to 13th
avenues, and 13th to Bannock Street, south of the museum.
The challenge facing the architect who will design the DAM
addition (and whose name will be announced Thursday) is daunting.
Any new building will have to complement these award-winning
landmarks – or at least not clash with them, even as it asserts
its own distinctive and hopefully exciting character. To represent
an art museum, it should be of noteworthy, even dazzling design,
as well as a remarkable and rewarding addition to Denver’s urban
landscape.
And it must fulfill the museum’s need to show more of its
treasures. Almost as important, the site is a block from Denver’s
premier public gathering place, the 16-acre Civic Center, itself
an architectural time capsule of the way the city developed.
The 1894 gold-domed state Capitol looks across three blocks
of grassy park to the 1932 City and County Building of white
Cotopaxi granite. Civic Center also features the 1910 Carnegie
Library now used by the city to collect taxes; the 1960 University
of Denver Law School International-style building now called City
Annex I, and about to get its own tower addition; and the 1977
moderne Judicial/Heritage Center.
Civic Center is on the National Register of Historic Places,
a designated Denver Landmark District and is protected by a view
preservation ordinance. It’s a demanding neighbor.
The three finalists for Thursday’s announcement each will
have a day to meet individually with the committees making the
decision: the museum’s Board of Trustees Architectural Review
Committee of 15 members and the 12-member City Selection
Committee, appointed by Mayor Wellington Webb.
Eighteen architects applied initially, and that number was
cut to five. “Perhaps the most foremost architects in the world
today,” said DAM director Lewis Sharp. The three finalists were
named in April.
Daniel Libeskind of Berlin will meet with the two committees
on Monday, Arata Isozaki of Tokyo on Tuesday, and Thom Mayne of
Santa Monica, Calif., on Wednesday.
All three came to Denver in May, when the five semifinalists
were selected, and returned in early June for a public forum and
discussions with museum personnel.
A look at the three finalists: Daniel Libeskind, 54, has considerable museum experience,
having designed the new Jewish Museum in Berlin; the Felix
Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck, Germany; an addition to the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London, to be completed in 2004; the Imperial
War Museum-North at Manchester, England, under construction; and
the Jewish Museum in San Francisco, to reopen in a renovated power
substation in 2002.
The New York Times in February said his Jewish Museum in
Berlin was “widely judged the most important of the many buildings
that have risen in the German capital since the destruction of the
Berlin Wall.”
While for some years Libeskind’s most evident
motif was the zigzag, in more recent design he has turned the line
and the void in on itself, creating a spiral that houses many
different activities in a small amount of space.
Architectural success came slowly to the Polish-born
Libeskind, who was 52 when he completed his first building, the
Nussbaum Museum in 1998, hailed as “a triumph of beauty of
Libeskind’s crisscross style … with canted intersection, oblique
slots, scored elevations” by Architecture magazine.
Libeskind was educated as a concert pianist in Israel and
played Carnegie Hall to great acclaim before switching to
architecture, becoming head of Cranbrook Academy’s architecture
department in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He became a U.S. citizen in
1965, and received an architectural degree at the Cooper Union for
the Advancement of Science and Art in 1970 in New York City.
In the early ’80s he began entering architectural
competitions, then moved to Europe and settled in Berlin.
Arata Isozaki, 69, tends to use more sculptural, flowing
shapes, curved and sensuous, in his work – “abstract, incomplete,
and in search of a perfection Isozaki knows and deliberately shows
he cannot achieve,” the New York Times proclaimed in 1997.
His 1995 Domus Interactive Museum About Humans, in La Coruna
on the northwest coast of Spain, has been widely praised for its
beauty. Isozaki compares it to a billowing sail, while others
favorably compare it to a ship’s rounded hull, of gray slate with
golden flecks; the Times critic noted that “one could look at this
shape for hours without getting bored.”
He designed the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan and
the Center of Japanese Art and Technology in Krakow, Poland, both
in 1994. In Columbus, Ohio, he designed a 1,000-foot-long concrete
curve for the $125 million Center of Science and Industry, which
technically was an addition to the 1924 neo-classical Central High
School.
Isozaki has described it as the school looking to the past,
the museum to the future, while others praise his building as
being a handsome horizontal monumental foil to downtown
high-rises. The Times called it “a closed, mysterious and imposing
presence in Columbus’ otherwise rather homogenous landscape.”
The architect received an architecture degree from the
University of Tokyo in 1954, when he went to work with the famed
Japanese architect Kenzo Tange until 1963, when he established his
own office. He has juried a number of international architectural
competitions.
Isozaki also designed the Kitakyushu City Museum of Art in
1972, with annex, 1985-86, and a central library for the city in
1973-74; the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, in 1974, with an
extension in 1997; Okanoyama Graphic Art Museum, 1982-84, in
Nishiwaki; the Brooklyn Museum Master Plan, 1986; the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1986, and Art Tower Mito, 1990.
Museums over the centuries have changed, he has noted, from
the late 18th century, when they gave public exhibition of the
personal collections of king and lords, to second-generation
museums derived from “salons and ateliers of the urban
bourgeoise,” to contemporary museums in the architectural model of
a loft, “with static exhibition of paintings and sculptures
replaced by artists’ live installation.”
Thom Mayne, 57, who heads his own firm Morphosis, has never
designed a museum, though many of his other public buildings have
merited strong accolades. He is not daunted.
“I’ve spent my whole life preparing to sit in this chair,” he
told DAM officials at his initial interview. Recalling this,
director Sharp notes that “often architects do their best when
they’re doing their first” (example of a special project).
His most recent project, and highly lauded, is Diamond Ranch
High School in Pomona, Calif., which a Los Angeles Times
architectural critic describes as “a project of such surprising
beauty and intelligence that it instantly reaffirms one’s faith in
architecture’s ability to address deep social issues. It proves
that public buildings can be more than symbols of civic pride;
they can serve as models for a decent society.”
The New York Times called it “a stunning school, built with a
feeling for resourcefulness and thrift: not a bad lesson for
students.”
Austrian bank praised Like Libeskind, Mayne had two restless decades in which few
designs were built, but if anything, that seems to have forged his
creative spirit to a sharper focus.
Among his recent projects, Hypo Alpe Adria Bank, of
Klagenfurt, Austria, was praised in the February issue of
Architecture magazine as “a building of tremendous power and
persuasion … that, like any number of palaces and Catholic
churches in this part of the world, defines the institution
itself. … An effort of great scope and ambition, executed with
dazzling skill and ingenuity, Hypo Bank is a building capable of
affecting Austria’s entire building culture.”
The University of Cincinnati Student Recreation Center, the
University of Toronto Graduate Housing, Cedar-Sinai’s
Comprehensive Cancer Center/Salick Healthcare, and the Blades
Residence, a housing project in Santa Barbara, Calif., are among
his other projects.
Though some of his early designs seem stark and sharp-edged,
jutting out, Mayne has said that “I’m trying to be friendly and
more accommodating as I get older.” He must be succeeding; one
office building client said, “I never get tired of this place. I’m
always energized by it, as are others.”
Mayne received his bachelor of architecture from the
University of Southern California School of Architecture in 1968,
his master’s from Harvard in 1978, and has taught at the
University of California of Los Angeles for the past six years,
and served as visiting faculty at numerous universities.
After the three semifinalists were selected, DAM director
Sharp and Jennifer Moulton, director of planning for the city of
Denver and chairwoman of the city selection committee, went to
Europe in May with other museum executives to visit four of the
buildings designed by these architects.
In June, Sharp and
Moulton returned for a closer examination of the buildings with
members of the city selection committee.
“You can’t tell about
buildings in two-dimension, no matter how good the photographs.
You have to be in it,” Moulton, an architect, observed. “You have
to walk beside it, see how it fits the urban context, how the
building ages, if the detailing holds up, even how they display
collections.
“In every case we were able to meet with the local architects
and get their evaluation of how they worked with our candidates,”
Sharp said. He added with some seriousness that it was even
valuable to talk to custodians.
“The Denver Art Museum is probably the most economical museum
in the country to operate,” he continued. “The Metropolitan Museum
in New York (where Sharp came from) is an all-gas building,
expensive to heat and to cool.
“We want not just beautiful design, a dramatic building, but
it has to be functional for our programs, and economical to
operate, too.”
Public input
For more than a month the museum has displayed in its main
lobby descriptions and photographs of buildings by the three
architects, and requested public comment. Isozaki was definitely
the favorite – “beautiful simple elegant forms,” wrote one visitor
– although all three had admiring as well as “not him” comments.
One visitor admonished “Get real architects!” while another wrote,
“Keep looking!”
In November 1999, Denver voters passed a $62.5 million bond
initiative approving the DAM’s expansion. The museum’s trustees
pledged an additional $50 million endowment for programming and
operations.
So what goes in the new wing? The museum has asked for 146,000 square feet of new space.
Whether that will be a tower, a building spread across the site,
an underground structure, or a combination of all will be
determined after the architect is selected and as he begins the
actual design. The winning architect will have approximately a
month to assemble a local team of architects and engineers to work
with him.
New galleries for modern and contemporary art and for
architecture, design and graphics are primary goals, but, in
addition, the African and Oceanic collection, which has been in
storage for almost six years, will gain its own space.
Hopefully, there also will be a larger space for textiles,
which for decades had an entire gallery and was one of the
museum’s most popular exhibitions, until it was relegated to a
lesser role.
Benefit to visiting shows
New exhibition spaces will accommodate larger traveling shows
that now bypass Denver. There will be more room for the education
programming with new classrooms and lecture space.
The current process of selecting an architect is a far cry
from how the 1971 tower was designed.
It was decided that an outside design consultant of
international reputation would be brought in to give additional
luster to the project but that the consultant would be used “only
during the design development phase” and that all drawings,
executions and followup would be done by the office of museum
architect James Sudler, which would also design the interior
public spaces.
I.M. Pei of New York refused an invitation, demanding
complete control of the project. Le Corbusier in Paris had
previous commitments. In 1965 the museum contacted Gio Ponti in
Milan, with whom Sudler was acquainted. Because of that
friendship, and his fascination with doing a building in the
American West, Ponti accepted the ground rules.
But if the flamboyant architect of international fame were to
design only the exterior, he meant it to be a building that would
be remembered. Ponti wanted to give Denver an art museum like no
other in the United States, “with a particular and characteristic
exterior that had no precedent.”
He definitely succeeded, first in the design of the
seven-story tower, with an array of slits and geometrically shaped
windows that adorn the building, giving an illusion of “ribbons of
light” at night.
For daytime magic, the tower was covered with prism-cut
tiles. More than a million gray glass tiles have a luminous
appearance, reflecting the changing sky, even turning to orange
and red in the sunset.
Captured “illusiveness’
The building reflected Ponti’s principle of “illusiveness –
the quality that transposes the work to a level on which volume,
dimension, weight and movement are exclusively poetic and no
longer realistic. It is the quality without which an architectural
work is not a work of art, is not architecture, but only an
amalgam of techniques, materials, engineering.”
