This story was originally published in The Denver Post on Sept. 14, 2000.
Architect Daniel Libeskind of Berlin won the coveted
commission to design the $62.5 million addition to the Denver Art
Museum after an intensive six-month search, Mayor Wellington Webb
announced Thursday afternoon.
Libeskind, 54, was 52 before his first building was finished
– the Felix Nussbaum Museum in 1998, in Germany.
Since then he has
designed four other significant museums under construction,
including projects in Berlin, London and San Francisco. He was ecstatic when museum director Lewis Sharp called just
before Webb’s news conference to tell him he had been selected.
“He told me, “This is the most important museum of my life
and I will build you a great museum,'” a beaming Sharp told the
crowd.
Libeskind is a widely known architectural theorist who has
lectured around the world and won several top awards.
In February, The New York Times said his Jewish Museum
project 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.”
The new Denver Art Museum structure – slated for completion
in 2004 – will rise in the parking lots south of the existing
building.
Libeskind was the unanimous choice of the museum’s Board of
Trustees Architectural Review Committee and the City Selection
Committee appointed by the mayor.
Committee members said the decision was difficult because all
three finalists – including Arata Isozaki of Tokyo and Thom Mayne
of Santa Monica, Calif. – were dazzling in their presentations and
in the caliber of their past work.
In a phone interview shortly after the announcement,
Libeskind’s excitement and exhilaration were palpable.
“Denver is a spectacular place, one of the most stunning
places in the whole world, not just for its beauty, but for its
history and its people,” he said. “It’s so representative of the
American character. It’s the most exciting project in the whole
world, … next to two great buildings, the Gio Ponti-designed
(art) museum and the Michael Graves library, near your Civic Center.”
The first of its kind
The Polish-born architect was so excited that his words
tumbled out in incomplete sentences.
“It will be the first pure contemporary museum of art of the
21st century. … The stunning openness of the skies … not just
the great blue sky overhead, but the sky that exists in the heart
of the people of Denver, and has from the beginning. It will be a
privilege to work there,” exclaimed the naturalized American
citizen who has lived in Germany since the mid-1980s.
Webb predicted that the museum addition would prove to be “an
economic catalyst,” especially for the nearby Golden Triangle
neighborhood, which is undergoing a revitalization.
He spoke of the museum’s value in drawing people to Denver.
“People don’t fly to Florence, Italy, to see the airport or watch
a soccer team,” he noted. “They go to see the art.”
Denver voters approved the $62.5 million bond issue in
November 1999 to expand the art museum (founded in 1893) beyond
the 1971 castle-like Ponti tower that looms over Civic Center.
Museum trustees pledged another $50 million endowment for
operations and programming.
The museum wants 146,000 square feet of new space, and a
1,000-car parking garage. The wing will house new galleries for
modern and contemporary art and for architecture, design and
graphics, the African and Oceanic collection, and textiles, and
provide new exhibition spaces to accommodate larger traveling
shows, as well as more education space.
In turn, this will give more exhibition space to the
departments remaining in the Ponti building, Sharp said.
The building site is bounded by Bannock and Acoma streets and
12th and 13th avenues, immediately south of the museum. Whether
the addition will cover the site, be a tower or be built partly
underground will be determined over the next 18 months as the
architect talks to museum staff, the community, visitors and city
officials before construction begins.
No formal design work has been done. Libeskind showed concept
sketches to the search committee, but they may bear little or no
resemblance to the finished structure.
Over the next month Libeskind will select local design and
engineering teams with which to work, and probably some of his
staff will relocate to an office here.
Process praised
The architect lauded the selection process as “exemplary, …
with the most extraordinary communication, one of the most
culturally sensitive processes I’ve seen. This is a complex
proposal, on many different levels, and the museum handled it with
great care.”
A “Request for Qualifications” was made in the early spring,
and 18 architectural firms responded; that was narrowed to five
firms in April, and three the following month. In May, Sharp and
Jennifer Moulton, director of planning for the city of Denver and
chairwoman of the city selection committee, joined two museum
curators already in Europe to visit work by the finalists.
The three finalists came to Denver in June, met with museum
and city officials, and held a public forum.
Also in June, members of the selection committee visited
Europe to see a selection of buildings designed by the candidates.
The three architects were back in Denver this week; each had
one day to present a workshop on the possibilities and visions for
a new museum.
“The workshop gives a chance to see how the
architect works with the client. It will not work if the
relationship doesn’t,” said Moulton, herself an architect.
