Offering a sharp contrast to the Denver Art Museum’s massive, flamboyantly angled addition, the Clyfford Still Museum’s planned $33 million building will be a place of “reflection, refuge and intimacy,” design architect Brad Cloepfil said.
During a Monday news conference, Cloepfil, founder of Allied Works Architecture of Portland, Ore., unveiled a low-lying, unobtrusive design for the 31,500-square-foot structure on a mid-block site just west of the DAM’s Hamilton Building on Bannock Street between 12th and 13th avenues.
“It’s not about about the building as an object,” he said. “It’s not about the building as a form. But it’s about what we hope is a series of spaces that provide moments for introspection and repose.”
The Still Museum will house more than 2,400 of the famed abstract expressionist’s works — about 94 percent of everything he created. In 2004, Patricia Still, the artist’s widow, agreed to donate his estate to Denver.
The rectangular, rigidly rectilinear building will be 39 feet tall, almost exactly the height of the Hamilton Building’s sculpture deck, thus not blocking views from that key vantage point. It will have two stories, with a geometric interplay of 14- and 18-foot-tall galleries on the top floor and offices, archives and educational space below.
Cloepfil wants this building to exert a solid, compressed feeling that is achieved in part by the building cantilevering over a 3,600-square-foot unimpeded area on the ground level that is divided into a long, narrow patio and a 10-foot-tall lobby. There is no grand atrium.
“Around the central space, there are slots that you get glimpses up,” Cloepfil said. “It’s all about glimpses. Given that the building is small, they’ll have a real impact.”
Except for a few places around the ground floor, the building will be largely devoid of windows. What might best be described as slits and slots, including ones capping the taller second-floor galleries, will channel natural light onto both floors.
The building will be constructed of textured concrete, which will be visible not only on the exterior but also on the ceilings and some of the interior walls, with the look and character of the concrete varying depending on its placement.
Although final decisions have not been made, the concrete could be mixed with an aggregate — perhaps crushed obsidian or quartz — that will reflect and refract light. No color has been set, but Cloepfil said it has to be neutral — perhaps a shade of white on the exterior.
Visitors will enter the building through a dense grove of trees, most of which will be planted on an adjacent city-owned lot on the southeast corner of West 13th Avenue and Bannock Street. This tiny forest, which will largely screen views of the museum, is designed to serve as a kind of natural outdoor foyer.
“It’s almost as if you enter the building when you enter the trees,” Cloepfil said. “And then you sort of find the building in the trees.”
