Educational Media Reviews Online

In the late 1990s, filmmakers Amie Knox and Jocelyn Childs, who holds a master’s degree in architecture, set their sights on the Denver Art Museum’s planned expansion as the focus of a documentary on the architectural process. After selling their proposal to museum director Lewis Sharp, Knox and Childs would spend the next six years capturing the complexity of this multi-faceted project.

Defying Gravity comprises three films documenting the design and construction of the Denver Art Museum’s new Frederic C. Hamilton Building which opened to the public in 2006. Adjacent to the 1971 museum designed by Italian architect Gio Ponti, the Hamilton Building makes a very different statement. While each is innovative in its own way, the newer building, with exuberant references to the jagged peaks of the Colorado Rockies, contrasts sharply with the stark, vertical lines of its earlier counterpart.

The first of the three films, Selection of the Architect, follows a process that began in 1999 at a point when more than 40 architects were under consideration by the selection committee. In May of 2000, the filmmakers were on hand when five of these architects—Robert Venturi, Arata Isozaki, Steven Holl, Thom Mayne, and Daniel Libeskind—were interviewed on site, and again in June when three finalists, Mayne, Libeskind, and Isozaki, presented their designs at a standing-room-only public forum.

The second film, Spatial Dance, details the design process that followed the selection of architect Daniel Libeskind for the commission. This part of the project spanned more than two years during which members of the design team traveled regularly between two continents—the museum site in Denver and Libeskind’s office in Berlin.

The final documentary and title film, Defying Gravity, follows Libeskind’s design through the extraordinarily challenging construction phase which began in 2003. The filmmakers visited the site nearly every two weeks for more than two years, capturing not only the highly visible progress of the building itself, but events behind the scenes, as well, as museum curators worked with architectural models to visualize their collections in spaces without right angles or vertical walls.

In an accompanying commentary, the filmmakers offer a great deal of insight into the challenges they encountered throughout the project. In addition to the filmmakers’ commentary the DVD features a slideshow of images by Jeff Wells documenting the construction process.

On a technical note, the audio quality in parts of first film is poor—though not unintelligible—reflecting the less-than-optimum conditions in which filming took place. While the filmmakers describe the work as a “low budget” venture, it should not be taken in a negative sense; the quality of the production is, otherwise, consistently high.

An eye-opening documentary on the creative process, Defying Gravity is recommended for any library with collections in architecture, art and museum studies.