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Clyfford Still Museum Denver / Allied Works Architecture

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. 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.

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