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DENVER (AP/CBS4) ― Architect Daniel Libeskind has upstaged the Rockies with his new wing of the Denver Art Museum, as jagged as the nearby peaks that inspired it.

New condominiums facing the museum sold faster than units with mountain views, something developer George Thorn had never seen in his 35 years in the business. The homes were built as part of the museum project and some are almost close enough to reach out and touch.

"It looks like the Titanic is about to run over you," Thorn said. The most expensive units go for $1.5 million.

And with Libeskind's contribution, the area has become paradise for lovers of architecture.

"Where else can you see buildings by Ponti, Libeskind and Graves out your window?" Thorn asked.

Gio Ponti designed the existing castlelike museum, completed in 1971, and Michael Graves fashioned the seven-story Denver Public Library, which musters together squares, towers and cylinders in Western desert colors and opened in 1995. All three are within 100 yards of each other.

"I was inspired by the mountains. But at the same time I wanted to create a linkage, a conversation, a dialogue between the buildings," said Libeskind, who recalled living in Milan, Italy, next to Ponti's Pirelli Tower, and seeing his Denver museum on the cover of a magazine. "I thought it was amazing."

Sculptor Louise Bourgeois' famed 11-foot-high spider sits next to the museum's doors.

The soaring titanium-clad Libeskind wing, which opens Saturday, has already helped the museum negotiate its first-ever traveling exhibition from the Louvre Museum.

"We've never been able to have a relationship with a museum as large and as important as the Louvre," said Lewis Sharp, Denver museum director. "Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures From the Louvre" will be on view from Oct. 6, 2007-to Jan. 6, 2008. It will include sculptures, antiquities, paintings and drawings by Rubens, Titian, Velasquez and Durer, as well as decorative arts and porcelain.

In museum circles it is called the Bilbao Effect — that a museum's building is as important as its collection — a reference to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, often called Frank Gehry's masterwork.

But Denver had been taking chances long before Gehry's building was completed in 1997. Ponti's building shocked many, and remains controversial. Denver International Airport's teepeelike structure opened to ridicule in 1995. The new library opened the same year and some people still shake their heads when they see it for the first time.

Still, said Sharp, "Great art looks great no matter where you put it. That doesn't mean you cannot create an environment that it will look better in and will engage people."

He said that curators are no longer content to put their collections in rectangular or square boxes.

A glass walkway connects the two museum wings. Libeskind's wing rises from two stories to four as it moves from south to north. From a different angle it can look like an unfolded fan of shards.

Most of the art works aren't hanging on "Daniel's walls," as the staff calls the interior walls, suspended from the ceiling or projected from the slope in some other way so they don't require the viewer to stand on tip toes or bend over to see it in its proper perspective.

There's none of the intended disorientation of Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin.

"There are no bizarre things here," Daniel Kohl, the museum's interior designer, said. "It is a very classical museum. It is serene. We asked Daniel to give us large spaces that we can tailor over the years."

Kohl built moveable interior walls that can be reconfigured as needed. The walls are all white and floors black Douglas fir hardwood.

"I think there is a place for color in galleries. We certainly will be adding more color to the Libeskind building as we go forward. It is such a bold building that we wanted to begin the building celebrating the architecture," said Sharp.

There was a compelling need for more room. The Ponti building was built before traveling exhibitions became popular, and lacked the necessary amenities and space. In some cases the museum had to be closed while exhibitions were installed.

Now, with the $67 million project, it has 22,000 feet available of easily accessible space, enough room to handle any exhibition that has toured the nation in the past decade, Sharp said.

Quotes From Around The Country About Lebeskind's Building

Jesse Sarles of cbs4denver.com assembled the following quotes and links about the Frederic C. Hamilton Building on Oct. 3:

"If you've been in downtown Denver in the past few years you've seen it, rising from 13th Avenue in a series of glinting, haphazard angles like a futuristic ship preparing to set sail for the farthest reaches of the cosmos."

- Greg Glasgow, Boulder Daily Camera Staff Writer (Full Article)

"The building meets the ground softly, though, and seems to float above those walking by, a profusion of dynamic geometric forms."

- Mary Voelz Chandler, the art and architecture critic for the Rocky Mountain News (Full Article)

"It is lovely, it is jarring, it is exceptional. It evokes, for me, and many Denverites, a very personal emotion. In my slow marking of its progress, I have come to feel its presence invaluable as it breaks from the conventional landscape, begs to be studied, and refuses to be defined."

- Jefferson Panis, 5280 Magazine (Full Article)

"Icy blue numbers rotate through a sequence in eighty mirrors that dot the roof high atrium. The contemporary and modern art floors (yes, floors) have color, light and space."

- CBS4 Critic-At-Large Greg Moody, cbs4denver.com

"Walking up the four stories of the atrium staircase is the most satisfying way to get to know the building and appreciate its exciting and exacting geometry. Everything tilts, even the furniture, and unexpected vistas open."

- Patricia Miller, Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Durango Herald (Full Article)

"If anyone doubts that Libeskind's ideas are a route to a powerful new model of space and form--and there are people who still think of his work as eccentric grandstanding--this is a building to change minds." ... and ... "Libeskind's careening lines provide a perfect force field, a reminder of the dynamic rethinking of space that was behind so much of modern art to begin with."

- By Richard Lacayo, TIME Magazine (Full Article)

"The building has the peculiar magnetic power of a glowing geode produced by a crashed meteorite. Its folded planes in luminous matte titanium catch the sharp, high-altitude light, kaleidoscopically alternating deep shadows with shades of reflection."

- James S. Russell, Bloomberg's U.S. architecture critic (Full Article)

"The interior of Libeskind's museum is full of remarkable manipulations of perspective and scale. Just inside the revolving doors, an atrium unfurls to your right and then explodes upward. Massive structural walls, all of them painted white, fly around at all angles."

- Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times Staff Writer (Full Article)

"For all its space-age strength, it's a remarkably soft-looking metal with the billowy sheen of heavy silk."

- By Cathleen McGuigan, Newsweek (Full Article)

Additional Resources

• The Frederic C. Hamilton Building at the Denver Art Museum will stage its opening, free, on Saturday and Sunday. But admission tickets will be timed. Timed tickets will be distributed from 9 a.m. on Saturday at the ticket office on Martin Plaza, across from the Hamilton Building. The museum is on 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock streets in downtown Denver. The weekend also celebrates the 35th anniversary of the museum's North Building. Performance artists and music and dance groups will perform both days and on Saturday evening.
  
• After the opening, museum hours will be 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday and Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The museum is closed Mondays.
  
• Cost: Colorado residents: $10/$8 seniors/students/$3 youths 6-18, children younger than 6 free. Non- residents: $13/$10/$5. Free for Colorado residents the first Saturday of each month. Visit denverartmuseum.org.
  

(© 2006 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)