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Budget a question for Still Museum

Mary Voelz Chandler, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 7, 2007 at midnight

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Plans for the Clyfford Still Museum are in that most fragmented of periods: the middle of schematic design, when questions and answers about a building rumble around in search of each other.

"I can't get too specific, but it's starting to come together," said architect Brad Cloepfil, who in November 2006 won the commission to design a home for Still's work on Bannock Street next to Daniel Libeskind's Frederic C. Hamilton Building.

"It's the most exciting building I've ever worked on," Cloepfil, of Allied Works Architecture, said recently from his office in New York. "It's a big dynamic time. We haven't pinned down materials, but we're getting ahold of the quality of space the work will inhabit."

Though the size of the museum is now estimated to be about 40,000 square feet, the budget range is still under consideration.

"We haven't fixed a number," he said. "We need to reach a consensus on how the quality of architecture will relate to fundraising."

But the plan is still to reveal the design to the public this fall, with an eye on opening sometime in 2010.

Research included a May trip to the facility in Maryland where Still's work is stored. "The warehouse is an amazing experience," he said. "For me it was getting to know the work in a most compelling way, from all periods, the tactility of them."

In March, during his last visit, Cloepfil was working on site plan options for the Denver Art Museum's wish to someday construct an office building on the same block of Bannock, between West 12th and West 13th avenues. That project, Cloepfil said, is on a slow path.

Cloepfil will return to Denver this month for discussions on the Still museum design and to see "Clyfford Still Unveiled: Selections From the Estate." He said the exhibition will help "get it to be real for the community."

"It's exciting. There's a sense of the specificity of this project. It really is a museum and a building and a space for his work."

Mary Voelz Chandler