Denver Art Museum

Colorado

A famous Italian architect built exactly one thing in the United States, and it is a twenty-four-sided castle in downtown Denver covered in a million glass tiles.

cultureengineeringhistorical

Gio Ponti was one of Italy's great modernists. He completed exactly one building in the United States, and it stands in Denver's Civic Center. It opened in 1971. Seven stories tall, two towers, a facade with twenty-four sides, and more than a million reflective glass tiles covering the outside. Ponti wanted to break the museum mold, and he did. People call it castle-like. Ponti put it another way. Art is a treasure, he said, and these thin but jealous walls defend it. The building was one of the first high-rise art museums anywhere. It was designed to handle a hundred thousand visitors a year. By 2017 the Denver Art Museum was drawing around eight hundred and fifty thousand. The building is inside the boundary of the Civic Center Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. Its official listing status within that district is non-contributing.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
It is his only completed design built in the United States.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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