As Sharp As It Gets

• Share

(3 of 3)

One complaint that's brought against Libeskind is that, like Gehry's, his unruly creations refuse to blend into their surroundings. But Denver has given Libeskind an unusual opportunity to prove that at the very least, his buildings can coexist happily with others like them. Directly across from his museum, he has designed a six-story condo building. Most of the walls are perpendicular to the floor, but the apartments feature just enough of his prismatic layouts and angled passageways to allow buyers to imagine that the muses themselves will turn up at the closing to applaud. The developer, George Thorn, is happy to tell you that in a city where Rocky Mountain views are usually the ones to go for, the units on the side facing the museum sold first.

Libeskind likes to point to those mountains as one of his inspirations. And it's true that the peaks rising just to the west of Denver call to mind the museum's wind-sheared escarpments. But to arrive at the deeper sources of his work, you need to go beyond landscape into history. A place to start is with the unmistakable traces of the Russian Constructivists. Flourishing just before and after the Russian Revolution and eventually crushed by it, they produced drawings and sculptural projects that would dismember Renaissance space. In Libeskind's knife-edged obliques, the interrupted discoveries of Vladimir Tatlin and El Lissitzky are brought back to life.

But it would be a mistake to comb through Libeskind's work looking for this or that historical ancestor. He's not conducting a seminar on the past. He's looking for ways to restore to architecture the intricacies that Modernism wrung out. "You could just as well say the inspiration also comes from the Baroque era," he says, "that desire to complicate space." What he proves with this tour de force in Denver is that sometimes complications are just the thing we've been looking for.