The Denver Art Museum addition represents both fulfillment and vindication for Daniel Libeskind. While the architect witnessed the erosion and diminution of his plans for Ground Zero, he has been able to realize an enriched, lively urban ensemble on the streets of Denver. Simultaneously, the structure builds on motifs first articulated at the Jewish Museum Berlin, reinforcing its experiential qualities and displaying a kind of architectural maturity intertwined with its subject. Finally, this most articulate architect has realized the American project he has promised repeatedly in words and images.
The museum extends the architectural stakes in a nondescript precinct bordering the prospering Mile High City’s urban core. Buildings that had struggled individually for decades to establish some kind of relationship are knitted together into a cultural center. Across the street, Michael Graves’s 1996 library, framed and vignetted into a series of episodic images of Tuscan tower and drum, never looked better. Literally tied by an elevated pedestrian bridge to Gio Ponti’s 1971 castellated tower that housed the museum’s collections, the titanium-clad addition, like shards of Kryptonite, reaches for thin air while a massive cantilevered prow looms toward the city with eccentric insistence. (Libeskind has cited the Front Range of the Rockies as his inspiration.) No one will ignore this urban sculpture.
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