Denver Art Museum

Ahead is the Denver Art Museum, a campus of two strikingly different buildings. The older one, now called the Martin Building, was designed by the Italian architect Gio Ponti and opened on October third, nineteen seventy-one. More than one million reflective glass tiles clad its twenty-four angular faces, and Ponti described the design this way: art is a treasure, and these thin but jealous walls defend it.

It remains the only completed building Ponti ever made in North America. Beside it stands the Frederic C. Hamilton Building, designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened on October seventh, two thousand six, his first finished building in the United States.

Its four stories are wrapped in more than nine thousand custom titanium panels that shift color from silvery gray to warm bronze depending on the angle of the sun. Libeskind drew his inspiration from the light and geology of the Rockies. Together the two buildings hold more than seventy thousand works spanning centuries and cultures, including an Indigenous Arts collection of over eighteen thousand objects representing more than two hundred fifty nations, one of the strongest such holdings at any American art museum.

The plaza in front holds large outdoor sculptures, including a giant broom by Claes Oldenburg.