print this article | 
e-mail this article
comment 
Museum Residences
156 West Superior
'PORTICO' Scots Church Redevelopment
Clipper Mill Assembly Building
De Plussenburgh
6747-6759 St-Urbain Street
Guerrero Street Mixed-Use Development
Viridian Noosa Residences
165 Charles Street
Lofts23Museum Residences
Studio Daniel Libeskind and Davis Partnership Architects wrap a parking garage with apartments and breathe life into a cultural district.
First there was the museum gift shop, then the café. Soon, signature museum architecture became a must-have. The commodification of the institution seemed complete. But museums have taken the phenomenon a step further with apartment towers, such as Studio Daniel Libeskind and local architect Davis Partnership Architects’ Museum Residences, which sits directly across a small plaza from the Denver Art Museum’s new Frederic C. Hamilton Building. These condominiums offer the ultimate amenity: an opportunity to bring—almost literally—the museum right into your home.
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.
When the Denver Art Museum first announced a competition for its expansion, the RFQ outlined the need for one building: the extension itself. Soon after Studio Daniel Libeskind was hired for the job, the project was ratcheted up with requirements for a parking facility to restore the spaces lost to the expansion and add to them. With budget constraints preventing a major excavation, the architects drew up plans for a five-story above-grade garage. But some people wanted more. For example, the city’s director of community planning and development, Jennifer Moulton, had long championed a vision for promoting street life with a mixed-use project that would connect Denver’s cultural and political activities downtown to the gentrifying “Golden Triangle” residential neighborhood to the south.
Libeskind and his team quickly demonstrated they shared Moulton’s vision. Instead of a freestanding garage, they proposed wrapping two sides of the 1,000-car concrete parking structure with a seven-story residential building anchored by retail space on the ground level. The strategy provided a tidy solution to the problem of concealing the necessary but prosaic structure, while also bringing new residents and activities to the district. “For me, the project was about how to create an urban space activated by the neighborhood,” says Libeskind. “The idea was not to create a stand-alone building, but to create life.” The mixed-use Museum Residences building and its adjacent Acoma Plaza—along with a forthcoming hotel and residential tower that the architects also added to the master plan—are a testament to this commitment.
Two rectilinear volumes comprising 126,000 square feet and housing 55 apartments abut both the museum-facing Acoma Avenue side of the garage and the 12th Avenue side, which looks out toward the Rocky Mountains. A curtain wall glazed with transparent and opaque white panels shrouds the concrete-framed building, while a zinc-clad, shardlike volume thrusts like a javelin through the two facades where they meet at the garage’s corner. Zinc makes another appearance on one more multistory angular block that projects from the facade, “bowing” as if in deference the museum’s adjacent entry.Formal name of project: Museum Residences
Location: Denver, Colorado
Gross square footage: 126,000 sq.ft.
Completion Date: October 2006
Total construction cost: $21 million
Owner: Museum Residences LLC (Corporex Colorado/Mile High Development joint venture)
Architect:
Studio Daniel Libeskind with Davis Partnership Architects – A Joint Venture
Studio Daniel Libeskind
2 Rector Street
New York, NY 10006
T. +1 212 497 9100
F. +1 212 285 2130
E-mail:info@daniel-libeskind.com
/www.daniel-libeskind.com/
Davis Partnership Architects
2 Rector Street, New York, NY 10006
T. 646.452.6190
F. 646.452.6198
www.davispartner.com/
Reader Comments:
