Design for All

BY DEBORAH PADDISON

Building Bridges

Making Art Accessible, Physically and Intellectually

In the Denver Art Museum's Frederic C. Hamilton Building, multiple seating areas, such as this one in the Modern & Contemporary Gallery, allow visitors to rest and partake of multimedia opportunities (music, video, audio presentations) to better appreciate the art. Photograph by Kevin Hester, courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.

When I visited New York City several years ago, I remember standing in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time. The immense, grand structure was extremely impressive. Yet, as someone who has difficulty climbing stairs, I must confess that all those steps were a little intimidating. How do I get in? I asked myself. I found the accessible entrance around the corner.

Of course, the Met was built more than a century ago, and its current front entrance dates from 1926—long before people with disabilities had a place at the table. But even today, large institutions still can be intimidating to visitors on several levels: physically, because of their size or perceived inaccessibility; socially, because someone who visits may look around and not see anyone else who looks like them; and also intellectually.

"If you're really trying to create a meaningful and truly accessible environment, you have to recognize that this intimidation factor exists and look for ways to solve it," says Dan Kohl, director of design for the Denver Art Museum.

That was just one of his assignments as Kohl represented the DAM during the design, development and construction of its new 146,000-square-foot Frederic C. Hamilton Building. Now open for a little more than a year, the ultramodern building, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind (as a joint venture with Davis Partnership Architects of Denver), is all angles and slants, echoing Libeskind's inspiration, the Rockies. On the exterior, 9,000 titanium panels reflect the Colorado sky. The Hamilton Building is connected via pedestrian bridge to the DAM's North Building (designed in 1971 by Gio Ponti).

Using Their Intuition

Kohl has 30 years of experience designing exhibits for diverse populations, the last seven of which have been spent at the DAM. Prior to that he was a consultant in private practice, designing exhibits for aquariums, zoos and natural history museums, as well as for Disney and Universal Studios.

Libeskind's explosive geometry in the Hamilton Building presented some interesting challenges when it came to the angular interior spaces it created, not the least of which was how to hang artwork on walls that tilt away from or toward the visitor. But more important for the purposes of this column, how do you make such a complicated space welcoming, user-friendly and comfortable for visitors of all ages and abilities?

The Hamilton building's titanium-clad exterior shows the building's complicated geometry, which echoes the shapes of the nearby Rockies. Photograph by Kevin Hester, courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.

"These are spaces that no one has seen before, worked with before or installed art in before, so it was fairly complicated even imagining how it was going to work," Kohl says. "We approached it with a sense of experimentation."

During a single visit to the museum, a visitor experiences multiple environments: the exterior landscape, the main entry and atrium, and the individual art galleries. Kohl wanted navigation between and within spaces to be as intuitive as possible.

"During the design process, Daniel [Libeskind] and I worked very closely to create a building in which, even though it has a very unexpected geometry, you can use your intuition to find your way without getting lost or confused," he says. Much time was spent on wayfinding signage, but more subtle cues in the form of light, sound and sightlines also play an important role in navigation. In the Hamilton Building, a large central atrium separates the permanent galleries to the north from the traveling-exhibit galleries to the south.

"Beyond being an incredible architectural statement, I felt the central atrium was crucial to people's ability to navigate through the building," Kohl says. The atrium houses the main public stairway, the elevators and the restrooms (which are stacked so they're in the same location on every floor). The atrium also has music, and the greatest amount of natural light. As visitors move through the building, they can intuit those sensory cues in order to orient themselves while moving from floor to floor.

From the top of the stairs in the atrium, visitors can make their way over to the bridge to the DAM's existing North Building, which sits across the street. But the design had to be tweaked to make that connection more obvious.

"Working with Daniel, we created a sightline from the top of the atrium stairs that allows you to see all the way through to the bridge," Kohl says. "We had to knock down some walls, and change some other walls to glass, all to create that intuitive guide, which is the daylight from the bridge."

The four-story El Pomar Grand Atrium features music and natural light cues to aid visitor navigation. Photograph by Jeff Goldberg/Esto, courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.

Going Above and Beyond

Of course, as a public space the Hamilton Building adheres to ADA regulations, with the requisite elevators, lowered counter heights and signage, accessible restrooms and so forth. But Kohl says the team wanted to go above and beyond, and they worked with the local ADA commission on a few situations not specifically covered by the regulations that needed some interpretation—one was making sure people with vision impairments didn't hit their heads on the walls that tilt inward.

Eschewing bare benches, the design team incorporated multiple comfortable seating areas, many of which feature art books as well as built-in interactive and multimedia experiences that further enhance the visitor experience. If you're in the African Gallery, for example, you can enjoy a welcome respite and listen to contemporary African music on an iPod; in the Western American Art Gallery, you can sit down next to a table and order up a specific video about the artwork of your choice—narrated by the artist—and it will play on a pop-up TV.

"It's another way of making the art more accessible," Kohl says. "We encourage visitors to linger, because many art pieces take time to fully understand. When there's seating available, people can sit, rest if they need to, and just take their time and enjoy the art."

Like many museums today, the DAM does an excellent job with programming for patrons with vision and hearing impairments, as well as children with learning disabilities. Sign-language tours are available; galleries have audio presentations, and touch-based tours help visitors learn about the art by holding something in their hand that relates to the art through texture and shape.

A museum is a place where everyone—regardless of age, race, gender, ethnicity, abilities, economic level or educational background—is invited to learn. The design team for the Hamilton Building took an environment that could have been especially intimidating because of its complex geometry and ensured that the spaces within and without are welcoming, comfortable and accessible.