The Denver Museum of Nature & Science is one of the city’s most important institutions. It has been around for more than 100 years and has a strong national reputation. It’s also a top local tourist attraction and a destination for groups of schoolchildren—they arrive by the busload, more than 3,000 a day. But in a city with showpiece cultural projects by David Adjaye, Allied Works, and Daniel Libeskind, the Museum of Nature & Science is definitely not an architectural icon. In fact, it’s downright ugly.
Sure, there are some fine neoclassical buildings dating to the early 1900s inside the complex, but they’ve long been surrounded by unattractive pre-cast concrete additions, which give the place all the charm of a suburban office building. Even the lovely 1940 Phipps Auditorium—the only older building that can still be seen from the outside—was long ago converted into an IMAX theater, its front steps replaced by an unsightly glass-and-steel entrance. (Yet another addition, a three-story glass façade on the museum’s west side by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, from 2002, was much more successful.)
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