I’d heard that the roof leaks on Daniel Libeskind’s new Fredrick C. Hamilton addition to the Denver Art Museum. But that wasn’t my main concern when I visited; they can fix the leak. I had seen some marvelous photographs of Liebeskind’s dramatic forms and I was hoping that the building would not disappoint when I actually got to see it. Would its scale work on the site? Would the soaring forms carry through from the exterior to the inside? Would the gallery spaces end up being broken into a labyrinth of boxes? Or worse, would the forms fight with the art and dominate it (as unfortunately occurs so often in contemporary museum design)?

The ticket windows are at the base of a glass stairway that frames the building’s entrance, thus allowing museum patrons to take care of business before the museum experience begins. The little plaza before the museum is bounded by the museum’s slanted titanium planes, the Michael Graves’ library, Libeskind’s Museum Residence condo, the thirty-five year-old Gio Ponti museum building, and the walkway to the city. The scale is human, the feel is light, and with the postmodern Graves building, the plaza lacks the gravity one traditionally expects from a public complex displaying instead a sense of humor that speaks well of Denver’s sense of itself as city.

As you cross the plaza, the museum’s titanium wall plates soar over you and glow from direct and reflected sunlight and you are drawn to touch them to see if they feel as soft as they look. The tilted wall planes and the steel skeletal structure expressed on the exterior are carried through to the interior where the structure is wrapped in gypsum board rather than titanium. The distinction between walls and ceiling planes is not always clear and you find yourself walking through arrays of folded planes.

As you first walk into the atrium it seem overly dark. But as your eyes adapt you realize that the window slits admit natural light in measured amounts that do not dominate the artificial light, producing a play of cool natural light with warm artificial light. Six-inch wide mirrored disks with randomly changing blue LED numbers further accent this play of color. The disks, which were conceived by Tatsuo Miyajima, are randomly set in the wall planes and help to define the walls.