“Gio Ponti, the prolific Italian polymath, designed everything from furniture to flatware, costumes to espresso machines, churches to skyscrapers. “He worked without pause,” Lisa Licitra Ponti once said of her father’s prolific career, which spanned more than six decades. He was the architect of the 1958 Pirelli Tower in Milan, celebrated as a symbol of Italy’s postwar economic recovery, and more than 100 other buildings in 13 countries.

But he only designed one building in the United States: the Denver Art Museum, completed in 1971, eight years before his death at the age of 87. The idea was to create a single home for the museum’s growing collection of art, then housed in a ragtag collection of small buildings. Ponti promised the trustees a signature building “with a particular and characteristic exterior,” something having “no precedent” that would help Denver transcend its cow-town image. And he delivered: A seven-story fortress clad in a million gray-glass tiles, the building—constructed at a cost of $6 million—was an unexpected and eccentric addition to the city’s skyline. High-rise museums weren’t exactly new at the time, but for a sprawling city like Denver, it was a daring concept. “I think Denver is ready for this building,” said the architect James Sudler, Ponti’s local champion and collaborator, as the design took shape. “The town is growing up, both culturally and aesthetically.”

Locals greeted the project with a mixture of pride and ridicule. Some critics blasted the building as “an Italian castle wrapped in aluminum foil” and “a campy set for a production of Hamlet,” as The New York Times reported. San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic Allan Temko, no fan of the reflective façade, called the museum the “largest reversible lavatory in the world.” Historian Thomas Noel, in his comprehensive 1997 book Buildings of Colorado, wrote that the project “is damned by its slabby exterior walls, which give it the look of a fortress protecting its loot from the hordes.” - David Hill for ARCHITECT