Witold Rybczynski has a new slideshow up at Slate, examining the architecture of Denver’s art museum, on the occasion of Liebeskind’s new addition, to be completed in September.
Whether you like this sort of mannered architecture is a matter of taste. Frank Gehry’s swirlings and churnings have always seemed lighthearted and whimsical, buoyed by an endearing take-it-or-leave-it quality. Libeskind’s forms strike me as aggressive. Standing in front of his building is like being buttonholed by someone shouting insistently in your face: And this! And this! And this!
I hope my “Denver correspondent” (that means you, Craig) will provide some comments on this.
(I really need to get around to reading his City Life sometime this summer, but it’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril for me right now, followed by Gilead.)
Helllllllllllooooooooo Ringwood!
This is your Chimera Obscura Denver correspondant coming to you live
from Montreal. Being in Montreal I can’t take any pictures to
illustrate this comment, but I’ll use what I can find on Photobucket,
Flickr and the web in general.
To my layman’s eye the plaza that Witold Rybczynski looks at allows a
viewer to get a good sense of the eclectic nature of Denver’s
architecture. You have everything from the showoff homes
of nouveau riche gold prospecters to the setting of a
western to the Cash
Register Building. I’ve never liked the DAM and have referred to
it since we’ve moved here as the “Prison of Art”, though I think I’ll
have to adopt the “Girl’s Reformatory of Art”. I like the library
next door, though I think it’s mostly for the colors. Continuing to
look out from the museum/library plaza to the left and right along
Denver Civic Center Park you see the state capital
building containing all of the world’s known supply of a certain
type of marble and lots of gold
leaf while across the park you have the Denver City
and County Courthouse. Needless to say, there isn’t really a
consistent style to Denver architecture. Most new construction in
Denver has a decidedly ’60s industrial
design to my untrained eye while in my neighborhood you have more
traditional homes along the model of the Denver Square mixed in
with homes that
look like they belong on a beach. The new addition doesn’t fit
any of this, and ever since the day they they started construction it
has looked like a random pile of steel was about to fall on 13th st.
More interesting topics to me have been the marketing of the
the Liebeskind designed lofts next to the new addition and the
covering of the addition in a protective
covering which judging by the new convention center, also made of
titanium, is merely to prevent blinding the populace until the
building is unveiled and then I need to pick up some stronger
sunglasses. By the way, here’s a couple of pieces of Denver’s civic
art: A 2
story bear looking into the convention center and these 3 story
dancers. The funniest missed photo opportunity of my life was
driving past these dancers as they were being installed and 2 men in
cherry pickers were painting their crotches with long handled rollers.