The Denver Art Museum has a new building designed by Daniel Libeskind. For those of you who don't know him, Daniel Libeskind first achieved fame with his work on the Jewish Museum in Berlin. More recently, he won the competition for the master plan for the redesign of the World Trade Center site in New York, but it seems that most of the design elements of the master plan have since been overridden by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation who commissioned the competition, and very little of Libeskind's plan will actually appear in steel and glass and concrete.

Returning to Denver, the Frederic C. Hamilton Building of the Denver Art Museum is a striking, angular structure that looks more like a sculpture than a working building. And in the view of this amateur architecture critic, it's rather more successful in aesthetic than in functional terms.

The museum staff are reported to have said that they enjoy the challenge of working with the odd spaces formed by the unusual architecture, but I am inclined to think they're just putting a brave face on it. Few of the walls are vertical, making it difficult to display most conventional paintings. Some of the spaces are so oddly-shaped that very little use can be made of them. And in many places the walls angle inwards so sharply that visitors are in great danger of hitting their heads – a problem the staff have resolved by placing awkward-looking barriers in some of the more hazardous areas.

It seems to me that the city has acquired an interesting piece of architecture, and a somewhat successful museum extension. Whether those who commissioned the building consider this a sufficient return on their substantial investment only they can decide.

I didn't take notes as I went, so I don't know the names and artists of all the pieces I photographed. Some of them I knew anyway, some I found on the web and some, unfortunately, I have had to list as "unknown". I will try to fill in the gaps as more information becomes available.

As I mentioned in the notes on my trip to Australia and New Zealand, I had bought a new wide-angle lens earlier this year. The architectural shots here make full use of this lens – several of the shots would be impossible without it. An extreme wide-angle lens can cause some odd effects, with verticals leaning inwards or outwards. But this is one case where the bizarre building makes life easier – when there are few vertical lines for reference, the distortions seem perfectly natural.