As Sharp As It Gets

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A museum is a great showcase for an architect but also a challenge. To protect the art, most museums keep windows to a minimum, which eliminates one of the main tools for making surfaces come alive. So for the exterior of the Denver museum, Libeskind chose more than 9,000 panels of titanium, the same material that covers Gehry's celebrated Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. It's a metal with a soft, refulgent glow and a variety of personalities. Gehry's titanium has a slightly golden cast. Libeskind's shifts from gray to silver and even to a peachy ocher, depending on the time of day and quality of the light. The shimmering surfaces and his endlessly fascinating massing of forms ensure that his Denver museum is interesting even on its windowless sides. Like George Clooney, it has no bad angles.

Although there's only one gallery in the museum with its own window, Libeskind has provided a spectacularly angled 120-ft.-high atrium that fills with light, which it communicates to any of the many galleries that have sight lines leading to it. And what light. He has positioned the atrium's windows so that it cascades in sheets or cuts oblique shafts through the air that mimic the diagonals of the walls and stairways, as though the sun itself had been recruited into his angular scheme. Architects are not known as humble souls, especially in this era of global stars. Yet what can you do but smile when one of them demonstrates that even the elements can be bent, literally, to his will?

A design as powerful as this can be a problem as a setting for art. The big question hanging over Libeskind's irregular galleries is whether they will overwhelm the art--the eternal accusation against the mighty rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. As it turns out, for a good deal of modern and contemporary art, Libeskind's careening lines provide a perfect force field, a reminder of the dynamic rethinking of space that was behind so much of modern art to begin with. Naturally, Cubist work looks right at home here. Likewise the angular channels of Frank Stella's shaped canvases. Even Donald Judd's no-nonsense boxes look better with something to play against.

Anything gentler or more sinuous may have a harder time. A multipart installation by Betty Woodman, the ceramic artist whose work is full of liquid lines, looks like somebody dropped a Matisse into The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And Libeskind's plunging vectors will never be the ideal resting place for Vermeer or Monet--which might explain why the Denver museum will continue to house most of its older art in the more conventional galleries of the Ponti building. Daniel Kohl, the museum's installation designer, has taken on the job of mediating between Libeskind's building and the art, mostly by way of partitions that softly mimic Libeskind's angles in ways that bring the pictures to a soft landing.