Okay let's get this one out of the way: Gio Ponti's Denver Art Museum is not his best building. It would be nobody's best building. But it is a very brilliant building, even though it tries a lot of ideas that don't always work.
Works: the basic premise. Instead of being a classic big, sprawling, flat, three-level supermall of art, like the Metropolitain Museum in New York, Ponti stacked the museum in a seven-story castle-like structure. Every floor is devoted to one area of specialty, which made it like entering a special realm devoted to that area. For collections that are not as strong in Eastern Seaboard museums, like American Indian Art, Western American Art, or Spanish Colonial Art, this effect of specialness is pronounced. What are usually the leftovers in museums with powerful Renaissance Painting collections are here the primary reason to visit. While the arrangement sacrifices some curatorial connections between periods and cultures by this separation, for this museum and the particular collections it specializes in, it works.
Works, sometimes: the castle idea. The building looks like a castle, and against the snowy mountains surrounding Denver, the conceit really works. I personally think it looks cool: it's straight out of Domus 1956. Not cool is the fact that there is a large concrete fence around most of the museum. It's not very friendly to many of its street faces.
Works, mostly: the windows. Because a lot of natural light is not desired, Ponti only cuts the building here and there to let little slivers of views and light to enter the exhibition areas. Again, for this particular collection, the presence of a direct window out, as small as they are, works. But barely: for painting collections, and many artifact collections, the windows are a curatorial problem. But for many of the collection areas (see above) the connection to the outdoors, and particularly to views of the Rocky Mountains, is welcome and desired. This museum is brilliant in its success in continually sequestering you for art viewing, and then giving you little moments of looking at outdoors which is totally not an art moment. Art Mall Fatigue is not a problem in this museum, a strength not shared by almost every other museum I've been to. Another powerful piece to this experience is that the main stairwell between floors is a concrete shaft with colored tiles. Yet to get to this shaft you leave the museum, go into a small outdoor space, and then go into the stair. The stair itself is rather brutal, but the experience of leaving the warm museum and going into the (usually) cold Colorado air is unique to most museum experiences.
Doesn't work: the materials and finishes. The thing looks a tad dated. The colored glass tiles on the exterior and in the stairwells scream 70s Italy, but I don't mind. It's the dusty florescent lighting, some worn exhibition displays and carpeting, and a strangely mismatched furniture collection that needs some help.
Doesn't work: the whole entry sequence. There's a cute little stair/overlook thing going on connecting the first three floors, but it's accessed through an empty exhibition room which is around the corner from the main entrance. Some of this is because the entry sequence has been reworked by the addition to this building.
Next we get to The Bower next door to The Castle, namely Daniel Libskind's addition. It's a lot of shards thrown together and the interior is shards and angled walls. You know the drill, no need to visit it really. However Leibskind's building is easy to get to, works well with its surroundings, and looks great on the outside. Inside, the spaces are a tad disorienting and at times annoying. Even the signage is tilty. RADICAL. It is saved by a powerful installation of contemporary art, but that is more of a compensation than a utilization. Ponti's windows are nothing short of subversive interruptions to the normally smooth consumption of art, and the technique is like an alternating current: on, then off, then on, then off. Libskind's building seems to just be a crazy-space way of framing art consumption, and it feels flat. It comes across like two people shouting at the same time. It's not as satisfying a solution because it does not seem to offer anything to the art except a pain in the ass.
On the other hand, the two together work really well, and Libskind's addition of course must be seen in this context. He's solved the biggest shortcoming of Ponti's museum: its presence in the city. The DAM is now cool again, and it's because it's composed of two buildings by design powerhouses.
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If it seems like the posting frequency has gone down a tad the last few months, that's because it has! I am also writing for USA Network's Character Approved Blog, which assembles experts in various cultural fields to talk about what we think is positively impacting the cultural landscape. I am the architecture expert. I mean, who else would they pick? Joke. I was honored to be asked.
Whilst perusing the website for the Living Walls Conference (coming to Atlanta in August!) I was taken particularly by the artist Miso, living in Melbourne, Australia. An entire section of her site is devoted to street art. Not necessarily original (any dweller of New York has seen dozens of work like this, living as we do in the graffiti capital of the world), but definitely with a specific grasp of how street art affects how we use and inhabit cities. Her work unifies a lot of the poster detritus it operates on, and creates a new standard for site-specific street art.]]>
Sometimes referencing three other things all at once in a design is a ridiculous mess (however fabulous the result may be). Sometimes, it rocks. Witness Kartell's new Masters Chair, which references silhouettes of famous chairs by Arne Jacobsen, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eero Saarinen. The resulting chair is some kind of seriously whacked out Thonet No. 14, capturing the lightness and alien spirit of that chair. In plastic.
Now that the Springs Mills Building is no longer taking second seat as part of the Milliken Building, the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission was able to see it in its full glory and give it Landmarked status (warning: PDF press release). It helps that the Milliken Building got demolished last year.
Jorge Otero-Pailos, an architect/artist, is our favorite kind of preservationist. His bio is all we need to know: "his work rethinks preservation as a powerful countercultural practice that creates alternative futures for our world heritage."
Like the love child, or a genetically spliced clone of, the DNA of the Eiffel Tower, Tatlin's Tower, and Umschreibung, Anish Kapoor has unveiled his proposal for the London 2012 Olympics: ArcelorMittal Orbit, which seriously makes no sense to me, is that one, two, three corporations mashed together or is that the name of the work? 2012 is the new 2007.
While more of a concept than a realized building idea, Herzog and DeMeuron's design for the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Porta Volta, Milan is brutally straightforward. In fact, the brutal finalness, the balance between grace and heaviness, the superscale and prefabricated grit had our first thought be thus: this is going to be Gino Valle's finest building ever.]]>
Ah, we wondered what Mayer Rus was up to these days. It's good to see his wit has found a suitable outlet.]]>
Hollin Hills is a modernist residential development from the middle of the last century in Alexandria, Virginia, not far from the US capital. This is our thing, and we have several bookmarks around these developments. The development was designed by architect Charles Goodman and features many of his house designs. What's exciting to me is how fresh and alive the houses look now. And, how wonderful of a departure it is for houses which in that part of the country are mind-numbingly attached to being some form of Oldene Lookinge Colonial Style. For those of you looking to explore, there is a house tour of Hollin Hills on May 1.
For those of you who thought Rosa Muerta was pretty sweet (and most of you did, the house got jillions of hits and went on a magazine tour) we would like to direct your attention to the amazing Acido Dorado. We got wind of this last December, but in our winter business flurry we let it fall to others to announce the awesomeness. Now we chime in.
Tropolism Corrections: we almost never do them! But this merits one.
The folks at the University of Washington are on the cutting edge of creating models of buildings out of millions of internet based photographs. With the wittiest of titles, Building Rome In A Day is a proof of concept that cities could be represented in computer models by using nothing more than the jillions of snapshots people take of places. They're not the only ones involved in this sort of thing, but we think they are the most interesting.