The hills are alive: with the opening of the Denver Art Museum's new building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, Denver has staked its claim in the contemporary art world. Boulder and Aspen add to the mix

Art in America, Feb, 2007 by Stephanie Cash

Quirky. That's the most common adjective I heard in Denver to describe the Denver Art Museum's exuberant new Daniel Libeskind-designed addition. Kind-hearted residents prefer "quirky" to other adjectives the critically panned building has received. Despite their trepidation, it's virtually impossible to find a person who doesn't recognize the impact the new building and its expanded collection will have on the local cultural scene. Close to 34,000 people attended the museum's 35-hour opening on the weekend of Oct. 7-8. With the Libeskind addition, in the works since 1999, museum officials expect annual attendance to double, from 450,000 to one million, in the first year.

The city has also signed on Libeskind to come up with a master plan for a cultural district around the museum, which will incorporate the adjacent public library designed by Michael Graves. Libeskind might here be given the freedom and control that was wrenched from him at Ground Zero in New York, where his master plan has been altered beyond recognition. Already open just across the museum's plaza is a privately developed condominium building (which contains a parking facility for museum guests), with a hotel still to come.

In profile, the Libeskind museum building resembles others the architect has designed for various projects, realized or not--the Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London--though here he was able to attribute his inspiration for the craggy, tumbling forms to the Rocky Mountains to the west of the city, and the rock crystals found therein. The museum is otherwise spared the heavy-handed symbolic gestures that Libeskind is so fond of, such as the voids in Berlin's Jewish Museum that represent lost Jewish residents, and his design for the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site, with a patriotic height of 1,776 feet topped by a spire that echoes the Statue of Liberty's torch.

Ushered to realization by director Lewis Sharp, who has headed DAM since 1989, the insistently dynamic Libeskind building forces visitors and passersby to take notice, and to think about architecture as an art form instead of as just a container. Yet it is that very quality, here as elsewhere, that has art lovers bemoaning the current trend toward arrogant architecture that is more about aggressive sculptural form and less about practical function, and DAM is the current whipping post for the disgruntled.

With nary a right angle in sight, the Libeskind addition, called the Frederic C. Hamilton Building after DAM's board chairman, is asymmetrical and angular in the extreme and frankly, as has been widely reported, inhospitable to the art it was built to house. Yet, after the initial shock wears off, it starts to grow on you. It's certainly more compelling than the museum's glass-tile-clad Gio Ponti-designed fortress completed in 1971, now called the North Building, even though that structure's gallery spaces are at least conventionally proportioned. The fact that the Ponti building is his only one in the U.S., and that Libeskind's is the first he has completed in the U.S., is a testament to DAM's willingness to take architectural risks. The two buildings are linked by a pedestrian bridge, which provides an impressive view of the Libeskind building's prow jutting out over the street toward the Ponti. The crossing also features a cafe and rooftop garden, and the museum's popular restaurant just below, at street level, serving as a welcome rest stop and comfortable meeting place.

Almost doubling the museum's size, the 146,000-square-foot Hamilton Building adds 40,000 square feet of new gallery space for permanent collections, along with 20,000 square feet divided among three special-exhibition spaces, in addition to a museum shop and auditorium. The $110-million project was partially funded by a $62.5-million bond approved by voters and a $28-million capital campaign; trustees have pledged another $62.5 million for an endowment. The museum also receives $5 million in annual support from the city's Scientific and Cultural Facilities District sales tax, which generates nearly $40 million per year for some 300 cultural organizations.

Clearly, the architecture poses some challenges. Dan Kohl, director of design, was charged with making the building work, which included designing the gallery spaces. Temporary walls divide the irregular spaces to provide sweeping views that allow visitors to take in multiple perspectives at once. But some challenges were better met than others, and some seem insurmountable. So that awestruck visitors or the visually impaired don't bonk their heads on the tilting walls or dynamic beams angling through galleries, small wooden barriers are bolted to the floor alongside any wall or around any corner that angles even slightly inward, severely compromising the building's esthetics (one wonders whether Libeskind or the museum staff or board ever considered that people would actually be walking around inside). But the architectural Band-Aids are a solution in progress. Since the opening the museum has experimented with strategically placed planters and sculpture to remedy the problem; a Kiki Smith bronze, for example, forces viewers around a triangular bit of wall that gratuitously thrusts into the gallery space.