Whether the building’s sharp peaks mimic the distant Rockies is almost beside the point; Libeskind’s designs tend to be angular anyway. What matters: the building is smashing. Its jagged forms soar out of the ground, an eruption of shapes frozen in the moment and hovering over the site as if held together by a powerful unseen force. Enhancing the museum’s dynamic beauty is its lustrous, silvery titanium skin. For all its space-age strength, it’s a remarkably soft-looking metal with the billowy sheen of heavy silk.
Strictly speaking, the $90.5 million Frederic C. Hamilton Building, as the new structure is called, is an addition to the old Denver Art Museum–a bizarre crenellated and tiled fortress built in 1971 by the late Italian designer Gio Ponti. But because the new building connects to Ponti’s by an unobtrusive footbridge, it essentially stands alone, an electric presence in the neighborhood. And despite all those weird angles and canted walls, it works surprisingly well on the inside–from the light-streaked four-story atrium, to the generous galleries, to a sculpture terrace that feels like the deck of a ship. “From the beginning, we never wanted a box,” says the museum’s visionary director Lewis Sharp, whose own team designed the gallery interiors. For the most part, the modern and non-Western collections look at home in the irregular-shaped spaces. And for counter-intuitive cool, the opening show will feature antique objects and tapestries borrowed from the Louvre. Mon Dieu!
“Denver is a daring city,” says Libes-kind, who’s gained celebrity status there. Across from the museum, a condo complex he designed is just opening, in a style you might call Libeskind Lite. Meanwhile, a smaller museum devoted to the abstract expressionist Clyfford Still will go up on an adjacent plot (the architect will be chosen later this fall), and the Museum of Contemporary Art has hired the hot London architect David Adjaye. “Denver has changed dramatically in the last 20 years,” says Mayor John Hickenlooper, who sits on the Denver Art Museum board. “In fact, the level of sophistication has risen throughout the United States.”
Right. Other cities share Denver’s appetite for new design. The Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, the first U.S. project by the ultracool Tokyo architects SANAA, opened last month, with elegant layers of curving glass that belie its structural virtuosity. Next spring workers will finish the Akron Art Museum, the first project here from Vienna’s far-out firm of Coop Himmelblau. And avant-garde New Yorkers Diller Scofidio + Renfro will soon open their first building, the Institute of Contemporary Art, on Boston’s waterfront. Whether these 21st-century designs spring from a cocktail napkin or a computer, they’re changing the face of American cities. You don’t need a boarding pass to feel the lift at takeoff.
