Denver — SO Daniel Libeskind knows his way around a master plan after all.
The architect's new wing for the Denver Art Museum, his first finished building in the U.S., appears at first to be primarily an example of aggressive form-making -- a branding exercise for designer and client alike. Libeskind says the museum's angular, titanium-clad exterior, a dazzling piece of architectural sculpture, was inspired by the Rocky Mountains. But it looks more like a collection of metal shards frozen in the middle of a huge explosion.
Inside, the soaring, canted gallery walls and corkscrew circulation pattern produce one dramatic view after another. They also make it impossible to clear your head long enough to consider the art in anything close to a contemplative state.
The combination of visual delight and nearly physical unease produced by the museum hardly comes as a surprise. Libeskind's few completed buildings -- most notably the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which opened five years ago -- are known for provoking an unusually wide range of responses: grief, a rushing sense of freedom, creeping claustrophobia. Along with a surprising gift for folksy rhetoric, those talents helped Libeskind, who was born in Poland to Holocaust survivors and moved to the U.S. when he was 13, win the 2002 master plan competition at the World Trade Center site.
He is now planner there in name only, and barely that: In ways large and small, his scheme has been circumvented by bureaucrats, politicians and fellow architects. Denver is not Manhattan, of course, and few pieces of real estate in the world have ever been as fraught as ground zero. But the revelation of Libeskind's design for the museum here, and the 55-unit condominium building that he designed next door, is how well its pieces fit into a larger civic puzzle.
For all its iconic power -- and for all the evidence it presents that Libeskind is still fully in thrall to the colliding, fragmented forms of deconstructivist architecture -- this is a project that a New Urbanist could happily endorse.
It also arrives, for better or worse, as validation of Libeskind's famously unflagging optimism. The last line of his 2004 autobiography, "Breaking Ground," reads simply, "You have to believe," and his endlessly rose-colored descriptions of the chaos in the ground zero planning process began, after a while, to sound more desperate than steadfast.
