Clyfford Still Museum

Toolbox: Board-Formed Concrete Walls

The Clyfford Still Museum’s concrete is its essence and its signature. Allied Works used poured-in-place concrete in order to achieve the massiveness and the cellular structure that architect Brad Cloepfil thought was the correct response to program and site. He also wanted that concrete to catch the light and to reveal the process of its making.

Initially the firm studied ways to manipulate the concrete itself to achieve roughness and variation of surface, finally settling on the formwork as the source of variety they wanted. Vertical formwork was constructed out of rough-sawn Hem-Fir planks that were ripped with a bevel or a router to create various fin depths; using boards instead of sheets of plywood allowed the architects to exploit the fissures between these wood pieces to let concrete ooze out, creating a much more hand-crafted aesthetic. A sealer was applied to the boards before the concrete was poured.

Though the surface treatment appears to be random, Allied Works carefully determined two patterns (one for the north and south façades, another for the east and west ones) based on the intersection of the building faces with the geometry of the perforated ceiling plane. For the north and south façades, 11 unique shapes of Hem-Fir board were used to create a repeat of approximately 7-1/2 feet. On the east and west façades, the pattern is much smaller in scale: two board shapes to create a repeat every 8 inches.

The application of three different textures lends further complexity to the patterns. On the thickest walls, the boards were routed to create a 1-1/2 inch-thick relief. This relief shrinks to 3/4 inch at inset walls, and to nothing where flush boards were used to form the interior gallery walls. As a result, the walls have seven different rhythms of vertical concrete fins, portions of which are incomplete by design, the result of fractures in the fins that occurred with the removal of the formwork. The ridges are deepest and most tightly spaced where they face the western sun, in order to create a strong pattern along the street. While the ceilings on the ground floor are also cast concrete, Allied Works created a flush, rough-sawn board-form pattern there to let the vertical planes appear as rough pillars.

Not only is the structure concrete, but Allied Works, in collaboration with Arup and KPFF, also developed a poured-in-place concrete screen for the ceilings in the upper-level galleries. This thin plane sports a pattern of distorted ovals, biased to the north, that run diagonally across its surface, creating openings for sunlight that enters through from the glass skylights above. This plane is structurally tied back to the adjacent concrete walls.

“We wanted a building that would look made, not constructed,” Cloepfil says. “We wanted something of the earth. Other art galleries have skylights and white walls that give you a sense of lightness. Here, we wanted everything to be heavy. We wanted the concrete to create the light, and the light to have weight.”

Denver, the Mile High City, is actually a city of the plains. That was the crucial realization that led architect Brad Cloepfil, AIA, of Allied Works Architecture in Portland, Ore., to design the new Clyfford Still Museum as a solitary object sheltered behind a screen of sycamore trees, like a homestead found in the windswept flatness that stretches out to the east, north, and south of the site. This 28,500-square-foot monument is now the permanent home for Still’s quintessential brand of American Abstract Expressionist works.

The Still Museum houses more than 800 paintings and more than 1,500 works on paper that the artist left to his estate. Still, who died in 1980 at age 75, was a difficult man and a complex painter who spent the last two decades of his life in near seclusion in rural Maryland, having essentially withdrawn his work from the gallery system. His will reserved the rest of his estate for whichever city would build a purpose-built structure to permanently house his—and only his—works. In 2004, the City of Denver and some of its leading citizens pledged to do just that, and have raised $32 million to date for the building’s construction. The newly formed Clyfford Still Museum selected Brad Cloepfil in a limited competition in 2006. The 2008 recession led to a construction slowdown, as well as a 10 percent reduction of the building’s remaining mass—a basement level had already been eliminated. The museum opened in November 2011 after selling four canvases—a move that required some legal wrangling since the initial bequest prevented any sale of Still’s works—for a net income of a little over $80 million, providing itself with an instant endowment.

Still never lived in and perhaps never even visited Denver, but he was “a man of the plains,” says museum director Dean Sobel. The artist spent his youth moving back and forth between Washington State, North Dakota, and Alberta, Canada, and his early, figurative work displays men and machinery trying to tame those environments. As Still moved into abstraction—a development that the museum’s opening exhibition illustrates—his canvases maintained “the sense that there is always an individual standing against a landscape,” Sobel says, whether of the plains or of the urban verticals of San Francisco and New York, where he spent much of the ’50s. Fields of colors opened up with vertical “zips” or interlocked with hooklike forms became his signature.

It is not difficult to find echoes of these shapes in the building’s design, though Cloepfil claims that such references were unintentional. A simple form composed of poured-in-place architectural concrete whose surface the architect manipulated to catch the strong light that shines over 300 days a year in Denver, the structure lifts a skylit floor of galleries over a base of offices, open storage, educational exhibitions, research and conservation labs, and a small lobby. The second-level galleries are rectangular, and many open up to one another with double-height slot corridors, so that you always see the paintings within a landscape of concrete walls and evenly lit spaces. The light is filtered through a cellular concrete ceiling screen whose geometry is biased toward the north. Incandescent fixtures supplement this natural wash in the galleries.

The galleries can display between 60 and 80 canvases at one time, though the inaugural exhibition fits 110, and much of the remainder of the collection is visible to the public in the storerooms, from behind a glass wall. Many of the paintings are still unstretched and rolled. A small research room on the ground floor will make more works available to scholars. Because of the adjacency of the Denver Art Museum, there are few of the other services you might expect, such as a café or a bookstore. This is a shrine and treasure house for a great artist’s work, no more and no less.

That quality of being a mausoleum is in evidence on the exterior, a solid and inward-turned volume that stands in contrast to the exuberance of the adjacent Daniel Libeskind–designed Hamilton Wing of the Denver Art Museum, but that also condenses the forms of the institutional buildings and skyscrapers of the surrounding city. Cloepfil, working with landscape architect Reed Hilderbrand, deliberately planted a grove of sycamore tree on the building’s exposed north side, as if sheltering it from the winds, but also so that, when the trees are mature, one’s view of the structure’s first level will be filtered through the trees. This is not a display of architecture, but a marker to the presence of art, a container for light and image, and a moment of art in the middle of America.

Project Credits

Project Clyfford Still Museum, Denver
Client Clyfford Still Museum
Architect and Interior Designer Allied Works Architecture, Portland, Ore., and New York—Brad Cloepfil, AIA (design principal); Chris Bixby, AIA (project lead); Dan Koch, AIA (project architect); Brent Linden, Susan Barnes, Robin Wilcox, Scott Miller, Chelsea Grassinger, AIA, Emily Kappes (project team)
Mechanical and Electrical Engineer Arup
Structural Engineer KPFF
Construction Manager Romani Group
General Contractor Saunders Construction
Landscape Architect Reed Hilderbrand
Lighting Designer Arup—Brian Stacy
Size 28,500 square feet
Cost $15.5 million (construction cost); $29 million (total cost)

Materials and Sources

Architectural Concrete Reginald D. Hough, FAIA
Building Envelope Simpson Gumpertz & Heger sgh.com
Exterior Cladding Stained western red cedar window and terrace screens; Custom board-formed architectural concrete walls
Flooring Ground and polished concrete; Stained white oak
Furniture Allied Works Architecture (lacquered reception desk and retail kiosks, wood and glass staircase, wood exhibit casework, steel gallery benches, and lectern)
Glazing Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope (skylight) oldcastlebe.com
Lighting Litelab Corp. (gallery down lights) litelab.com
Structure Cast-in-place architectural concrete
Walls Stained western red cedar wall cladding
Windows and Doors Dynamic Architectural Windows & Doors (stained mahogany windows and doors) dynamicwindows.com; SkyLine Sky-Lites (skylight) skylites.com