Suffering for Someone Else's Art

By Rita Healy

When the Denver Art Museum's new Daniel Libeskind--designed addition opened in October, the architectural reviews were mixed, but none of the critics said the place made them queasy. Then the visitors came. As they climbed to the upper floors of the titanium-and-granite-clad structure, which echoes the silhouette of the Rockies, some began feeling dizzy and nauseated. The likely culprits: a plunging 100-ft. atrium and walls slanted at odd angles. "If you have walls tilting toward or away from you, that disrupts people's balance," says University of Colorado architecture professor Taisto Makela. Of the 11 students he recently took to the museum, three felt dizzy.

The effect has a storied pedigree: similar reports dogged Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim museum in New York City. Spokeswoman Andrea Fulton says the museum has received only eight written complaints, but concedes "walls that aren't at 90DEG angles do present a different sort of spatial experience."