Designing a museum for an artist known for his terribilità is no easy assignment, which is why Brad Cloepfil, whose Clyfford Still Museum is scheduled to open in Denver on November 18, must be glad that the legendarily ornery Abstract Expressionist is dead. The first photographs to be released of the anxiously anticipated building, however, suggest that the architect has paid close attention to the late artist's temperament — with the result reflecting both Still's exacting expectations for his art and his personal astringency. 

Cloepfil, of Allied Works Architecture, has designed the museum to be the ideal place to see Still's work; the architect said that he felt the building "should settle into the earth and engage the surface of the prairie." Despite this organic inclination, the resulting museum is a hard, Brutalist structure, with uneven vertical concrete veins running through the façade subtly echoing the jagged edges of Still's signature abstractions. (The texture also recalls the wood-grained concrete surface of that high point of Brutalism, Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum of American Art.) Quartz and other local materials, meanwhile, are embedded in the surface, referencing the local Denver environment and creating flashes of light and color. Surrounding this severe exterior will be a dense grove of trees, providing a meditative experience for visitors approaching the site. 

According to Still Museum director Dean Sobel, the institution will feature a staggering 94 percent of the great painter's oeuvre, bequeathed to the fledgling institution by the artist's widow PatriciaStill. In order to accommodate the painter's diversely proportioned canvases, Cloepfil designed some of the galleries to showcase Still's monumental canvases, while other spaces are created to be smaller and more intimate, with lower ceilings. These tighter galleries will showcase Still's drawings. The museum's roof, made of perforated concrete, features motorized shades so the natural light can be adjusted over the course of the day.

One of the original "Irascibles," Still was pictured alongside Pollock,Rothko, Newman, and the New York School gang in the iconic 1951 Life magazine portrait. In fact, he may have been the most irascible of all of them: he was notoriously difficult to work with, and ultimately quit New York in the early '50s to escape what he saw as the city's baleful influence on art. Consequently, his work, while widely reproduced, is little seen. The new institution, and Cloepfil's sensitive building, will correct this, filling in an important space in the history of American art.

To get a first look at the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, click on the slide show at the left.