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Volume 3, Issue 18 August 30 - September 12, 2001 ART ARCHITECTURE APOCALYPSE NOW Forget the bad, let's just get to the good and the ugly. photos by sean hartgrove The bad news only gets worse. Every week it seems, another building that contributed to the beauty of the built environment is razed in favor of schlock. We've recently given (or all but given) the death sentence to I. M. Pei's Zeckendorf Plaza, Temple Buell's Denver Post and Sears buildings, and now Currigan Hall and Skyline Park. Why are we trading diamonds for rhinestones? As Denver planners steamroll forward, let us pause and consider a brief list of buildings, good and bad, and the consequences of not differentiating between them. LIBRARIES The Good: Ross-Broadway Public Library at 55 E. Bayaud is an architectural gem designed in 1952 by Victor Hornbein. With its flat roof, low profile, cubic volume, and grid-based ornament, Ross-Broadway is a fine example of Usonian Style (short for United States of North American), a fully American style popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright. Some of Hornbein's other gifts to the Queen City include the graceful (Usonian) Botanic Gardens' Boettcher Memorial Conservatory (1966), the only conservatory in the United States made of cast-in-place concrete. The Ugly: Penrose Library on University of Denver's main campus at 2150 E. Evans stands out for its complete lack of style. As it is approached, it looks like a huge cinderblock. Fortunately for DU, Penrose's homeliness is unique on this campus. This library reminds me of nothing so much as a prison. HOTELS The Good: The Brown Palace Hotel, at 321 17th St., is an Italian Renaissance style pearl designed by Frank E. Edbrooke. Opened in 1892, it remains a great and graceful lady who wears her size well and revels in her adornment. And its triangular shape is not only memorable, but thoughtfully allows daylight to visit each room. The Ugly: Holiday Inn at E-470 and Ken Caryl shocks the unprepared driver with its unabashed pink stucco nakedness, a big square shorn sheep. Two things make this sad building's existence even sadder: 1) it is only one of many ugly pink stuccoites here (see Die Pinkos below), and 2) it almost makes the rest of the nauseatingly tasteless sub-suburbs look good. CHURCHES The Good: My heart's choice is the ethereal Air Force Academy chapel, but of course that's in the Springs. Trinity United Methodist Church at 18th and Broadway is also real nice. No, that's an understatement. Built in 1888, this Modern Gothic building is almost the Platonic ideal of Church. Whenever I pass by, I'm tempted to sing Hosanna. The Ugly: Grace Chapel near the intersection of C-470 and I-25 is, to make a really bad pun, God-awful. It is most definitely not graceful, nor is it a chapel, which sounds diminutive and quaint. It is just another grotesque stucco behemoth that tempts me to break the Second Commandment. RETAIL STORES The Good: The Sears Store in Cherry Creek, designed by Temple Buell in 1954, still stands ... sort of. It has, of course, been compromised. Before its recent "facelift," it had something almost unfathomable for a modern department store: style. Buell designed a sleek brick and stone composition spiced with extras like sexy metal trim. It's too bad that, instead of inspiring other retailers to better design, it was instead brought down to same level of mediocrity. The Ugly: Big ! Lots at Broadway and 1st Ave. Okay, maybe it's not fair to expect this bastion of cheap goods to be well designed. But it is fair to point out its hideous, blank boxiness, capped off with a corrugated metal (!) roof, as the ultimate nightmare in retail architecture. It makes the nearby Broadway Marketplace look refined. BARS The Good: Forget trendy. The Cruise Room inside the Oxford Hotel (1600 17th Street), which opened the day after the repeal of prohibition, is still where it's at. The Oxford was designed by Frank Edbrooke in 1891, just before he did the Brown Palace, and was remodeled by Charles Jaka in 1933 into an Art Deco showstopper. Modeled after a lounge on the Queen Mary, The Cruise Room has retained its chrome, its neon, its panache. Sipping a drink, enveloped by the room's red glow, I am Veronica Lake. The Ugly: Putting Green Pub at 7785 W. Colfax Ave. is, well, very green. Green enough to keep me away. A big green metal, uh, barn? I have been in my share of ratty drinking establishments, such as Guido's Nickel, just down the street at Colfax and Hoyt. Ratty and tacky can be fun. But there's just something unappealing about imbibing, much less eating, in a place that looks like a Tuff Shed. WELLS FARGO FINANCIAL SERVICES The Good: Philip Johnson's 52-storey "Cash Register" building (1983) is perhaps the most recognizable silhouette on Denver's skyline. Originally called United Bank Tower, now Wells Fargo Center, the skyscraper's personable curved crown lends it its more familiar nickname. Its stateliness is enhanced by a surface that alternately reflects and glows with the abundant Colorado sunshine. This is the kind of imposing, but still classy, building money should buy. The Ugly: Maybe to make up for having such a nice building downtown, Wells Fargo put an ATM in one of the hands-down worst warts around. Located at 733 Santa Fe, American Family Insurance is-- surprise-- pink stucco that's about five feet thick. Why on Earth do people think this looks good? Santa Fe is guilty of more stucco per linear foot than anywhere else I visited. What a crime; perfectly nice bricks slathered in gritty stuff that looks like barf. And it's insulting to pretend that after/under-thought stucco gives an appro-priate ethnic look to this predominately Hispanic neighborhood. Stucco is cheap and that's why it's there. DIE PINKOS! So, you will have noticed, there are a frightening number of pink stucco beasties around town. Two of the most offensive squat like awful bookends on far sides of Colfax: appropriately Pepto Bismol colored Casa Bonita (6715 W. Colfax) and casa Blair Realty (4400 E. Colfax). In between? Mostly Stucco Blah style shopettes. --Kimberly MacArthur Graham DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION @ ROBISCHON GALLERY 1740 Wazee Street 303-298-7788 Through September 12 Report and Answer, the current show at the Robischon Gallery, takes an intelligent and expansive look at contemporary abstraction. This exhibit comes up with a slew of winners among very few false notes. Always a delight are the creations of Brad Miller. "North," an acrobatic wall-mounted piece, features the elegant ceramic forms and earth-inspired textures for which this master ceramics artist is best known. Miller also works in wood, as exampled by "Uno," a collection of branches intermeshed together and then smoothed and shaped to create an oval that measures well above knee-high, like a mysterious tree-hatching egg. With a memory of muscular mixed media installations associated with Judy Pfaff, it's a treat to see two-dimensional expressions of this artist's complicated visual concerns. "Oxygen" and "Untitled," both hefty works, sport everything from paper collage to dried leaves and branches, somehow condensing Pfaff's room-sized complexities into contained wall-hung artworks. Less complex and more visually pleasing to this eye are Trine Bumiller's paintings. Bumiller's horizontal rectangle of canvas is divided into two adjacent squares; each square then takes on disparate but somehow complimentary images. "Flight Pattern" juxtaposes river-like tributaries with a scattering of faint stars; in "Watermark," green waterlily pad-shapes float on a blue field that abuts a maze of branchy meanderings. Bumiller's treatments are loose and non-specific, letting the viewer's eye impose identification and meaning onto the sense of balance and serenity she's already created. Mario Reis' "Nature Watercolors" eschew standard media for direct contact with Mother Earth. Reis lays his stretched cotton canvas flat into a wilderness stream bed. There it remains, possibly for several days, while water rises and falls over the cloth, depositing soil sediment, bits of plant matter and the imprint of the water-currents themselves. The artist then carefully removes canvas from creek, sun dries the fabric and stabilizes the collected materia with a fixative that's invisible from the front, so all we see is an undulating layer of sand. For display, the three-feet-square canvases are off their stretcher-boards and tacked directly to the wall. Robischon shows six pieces and they read as a hybrid of Color Field painting and conceptual art. Color is subtle but distinct, and all the canvases are signed with dates and locations. The Jemez Mountains, Uncompahgre National Forest and other locales look radically different from this angle, but some spirit of each site carries through. There's an implicit sense of magical invocation in going so directly to the earth as a source. Not the first artist to work in this manner-- Michelle Stuart is a notable predecessor-- Reis makes a good job of it. The "Natural Watercolors" are breathtaking. Painter Gary Komarin checks in stroke-for-stroke with exactly what I was whining about elsewhere a few issues ago, so let's just take it verbatim: "This style seems damn near contagious ... ovals of color ... painted with a casual hand, as if the brush is barely under control ... thankless palette ... Philip Guston's sense of color ..." is there an evil MFA program somewhere instigating this stuff? Conversely, right nearby are two terrific new paintings from Mark Villarreal, "Gabriel" and "Dalit." While they also sport some ovals and a casual-looking hand, Villarreal's superb sense of color and composition carry the day. Tension and release, balance, rich tones, evocative blues offsetting punchy whites with plenty of bright grace notes ... look at these beauties, then glance back at Komarin's. Worlds apart. Paintings by Sam Scott (happy chaos), painting/ drawing combos from Udo Noger (mysterious swathing) and ceramic sculptures from Scott Chamberlain (bedpan? urinal?), along with others, round out the admirable range of work in the exhibit. --Renna Shesso

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