Clyfford Still Museum Design For Future Home

Tuesday, 01 April 2008 22:42

Denver, CO – The Clyfford Still Museum unveiled the design for its future 31,500-square-foot home in Denver, scheduled to open to the public in 2010. Created by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, the design reflects the institution’s mission to preserve, present, and celebrate the work of this legendary American artist. The building will provide intimate, architecturally compelling spaces for the study and enjoyment of the museum’s extraordinary collection, which encompasses some 2,400 works spanning Clyfford Still’s career and is one of the most comprehensive single-artist holdings in the world.
 
With groundbreaking expected to begin in early 2009, the Clyfford Still Museum will be the latest addition to Denver’s burgeoning cultural landscape. Sited adjacent to the Denver Art Museum’s new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, the museum will further enhance the cultural and architectural dialogue within the city’s arts district.
 
“Brad Cloepfil has created a compelling design that reveals a deep understanding of our goals and collection needs as a single-artist institution,” said Dean Sobel, director of the Clyfford Still Museum.  “The museum will provide intimate spaces that shape visitor experience and encourage further engagement with the life and work of Clyfford Still, one of the greatest American painters of the twentieth century.”
 
The two-story museum will accommodate a series of light-filled galleries on its upper level, designed specifically to display Still’s work and to provide an optimal viewing experience for the visitor. Education facilities, including a library and archives as well as educational videos and interactive kiosks, will provide supplemental resources and detailed information about the life and work of Clyfford Still. In addition, glass walls will allow visitors access to view works in the museum’s onsite conservation laboratory and storage area.
 
Building Design

The design for the Clyfford Still Museum envisions a dense, cantilevered, two-story structure, unified through the use of a single building material—a highly textured and resurfaced concrete, designed to modify light on both the exterior and interior of the museum. The 31,500-square-foot building will receive the full benefits of daylight, which will be filtered into the museum through a clerestory on the
second floor. The textured concrete walls will diffuse, refract, and capture natural light in the museum galleries, and will give the building a visceral, tactile quality on the outside.
 
Visitors will approach the museum through a landscaped forecourt, which provides a transition from the city to the experience of viewing the art inside. A cantilevered canopy of concrete, extending 10 x 120 feet from underneath the second floor and forming the structure of the second-floor galleries, will draw visitors from the forecourt into the museum’s lobby and reception area. The first floor will also accommodate the library, conservation studio, collection storage, and administrative offices. Connecting these facilities and visitor amenities is an open, double-high corridor, offering glimpses of the artwork in the galleries above and views for visitors on the second floor into the study areas below. This open corridor, which will also include educational facilities, speaks to the institution’s founding principle of unveiling this once-private and very personal collection to the public. It also lends transparency to the museum experience as visitors are invited to explore elements that are not traditionally seen by the general public.
 
About The Clyfford Still Museum

The Clyfford Still Museum was founded to promote public and scholarly understanding of the late artist’s work and legacy, through the presentation and preservation of the Clyfford Still Estate, totaling approximately 2,400 artworks bequeathed to the City of Denver in 2004. Considered one of the most important painters of the twentieth century, Still (1904-1980) was among the first generation of Abstract Expressionist artists who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still’s estate—now understood to be 94 percent of the artist’s total output—as well as his extensive archive, have been sealed off from the public since 1980.
 
The Clyfford Still Museum will be located in Denver, Colorado, in the heart of the Civic Center Cultural Complex, near the Denver Art Museum and its new Daniel Libeskind-designed building, the Denver Public Library designed by Michael Graves, and the Colorado History Museum. For more information about the Clyfford Still Museum, please visit :  www.clyffordstillmuseum.org