The public opening of the New Aspen Art Museum will be this Saturday, August, 9 at 5 pm. The new building, designed by the Tokyo-based architect Shigeru Ban is his first permanently museum in North America.

The pritzker 2014, Shigeru Ban, designed the 3000 square-metre building for a site at the corner of East Hyman Avenue in downtown Aspen, Colorado, USA. Its primary feature is a basket-weave cladding that wraps around the façade.

A grand staircase is slotted between this woven exterior and the interior structure. There also a glass elevator dubbed the "moving room" that will connect galleries at the northeast corner.

Glass floors allows visitors to see between storeys, while a sculpture garden located on the roof offers views towards Ajax Mountain.

The inaugural exhibition feature the work of artists Yves Klein and David Hammons, and exhbition about the architect. The Shigeru Ban exhibition is on view from 9 August to 5 October 2014.

The New Aspen Art Museum by Shigeru Ban.

Located on the corner of South Spring Street and East Hyman Avenue in Aspen's downtown core a few blocks from Aspen's main skiing/snowboarding mountain, Ajax Mountain, the new AAM is Shigeru Ban's first U.S. museum. Of its design, Ban states: "Designing the Aspen Art Museum presented a very exciting opportunity to create a harmony between architecture and Aspen's surrounding beauty while also responding to the need for the dialogue between artwork, audience, and the space itself."

Ban's vision for the new AAM is based on transparency and open view planes—inviting those outside to engage with the building's interior, and providing those within the opportunity to see their exterior surroundings as part of a uniquely Aspen Art Museum experience. The new Museum features 12,500 square feet of flexible exhibition space in six primary gallery spaces spread over the museum's four levels - more than tripling the amount of exhibition space in the museum's current facility. The galleries have a ceiling height of fourteen feet, most infused with natural light.

Visitors will enter the new AAM through a main public entry on the north side of the building along East Hyman Avenue, which allows access to the main reception area, as well as the new AAM's two ground floor galleries. From there, visitors may choose their path through museum spaces -ascending to upper levels either via Ban's "moving room" glass elevator in the northeast corner of the new facility, or the grand staircase on the east side of the facility perpendicular to South Spring Street. The grand staircase - an interstitial three-level passageway situated between the building's woven composite exterior grid and interior structure - is intersected by a glass wall dividing the stairway into a ten-foot-wide exterior space, and a six-foot-wide interior space. The unique passage allows for the natural blending of outdoor and indoor spaces and will feature mobile pedestals where art will be exhibited.

After climbing the grand staircase to the roof deck sculpture garden, visitors will enjoy unparalleled, sweeping vistas of Aspen's internationally recognised environment. This will be the only unobstructed public rooftop view anywhere in town of the iconic Ajax Mountain. The roof deck will also be an activated exhibition and event space, with a café and bar and outdoor screening space. Shigeru Ban envisioned that visitors would navigate the new AAM the way a mountain is navigated when skiing or snowboarding - by proceeding to the very top of the building and descending from floor to floor.

Other features of the museum's architecture include: "walkable" skylights that will assist in illuminating the single main gallery on the second level; two galleries, an education space, bookstore/museum shop and on-site artist apartment on the ground floor; and, on the new AAM's lower level, three galleries, art storage, and art preparation spaces.

 

Where.- Aspen Art Museum, 590 North Mill Street, Aspen, Colorado. US.
When.- Opening, Saturday, August 9th, 2014.

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Shigeru Ban was born in Tokyo in 1957 and after studying architecture in Los Angeles and New York, he opened an architectural practice in Tokyo, in 1985, with offices in Paris and New York, has designed projects worldwide from private houses to large scale museums.

His cardboard tube structures have aroused enormous interest. As long ago as 1986, he discovered the benefits of this recyclable and resilient material that is also easy to process. Shigeru Ban built the Japanese pavilion for the Expo 2000 world exposition at Hanover – a structure made of cardboard tubes that measured 75 meters in length and 15 meters in height. All the materials used in the structure were recycled after the exhibition. He developed a genuine style of "emergency architecture" as a response to the population explosion and to natural disasters: the foundations of his low-cost houses are made of beer crates filled with sand, and the walls consist of foil-covered cardboard tubes. A house of this sort can be erected in less than seven hours, and is considerably more sturdy than a tent.

Shigeru Ban is currently Professor of Architecture at Keio University and is also a guest lecturer at various other universities across the globe; his works are so exceptional that he was awarded the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture in 2005. "Time" magazine describes him as one of the key innovators for the 21st century in the field of architecture and design.

Shigeru Ban has designed projects such as Centre Pompidou Metz and Nine Bridges Golf Clubhouse in Korea. Current projects include new headquarters for Swatch and Omega in Switzerland.

 

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