When he died, leading American painter Clyfford Still willed his entire art collection to an American city willing to create a permanent home for it. During his life, Still had led the abstract-expressionist movement until he disappeared from the art scene in 1951.

Three decades in the making, the Clyfford Still Museum has opened its doors in downtown Denver. The 28,000-sq-ft steel and concrete building houses more than 2,400 of Still’s works, as well as a collection of the artist’s journals, sketchbooks and archives.

Its massive glass-lined lobby has windows extending from tiled floors to concrete ceiling – visually stunning, its highly reverberant acoustic presents a familiar problem for the large-screen video presentation that runs in the museum’s entry. Denver-based Empowercom stepped in to tame the challenging acoustics – with a Renkus-Heinz’s Iconyx steerable array loudspeaker system as its primary weapon.

‘The content management committee on the project had suggested the Iconyx system, and everyone involved unanimously agreed they were the only speakers that would meet the needs of the space,’ says Empowercom Vice President Terri Jackson. ‘Being able to steer the sound away from the abundance of reflective surfaces was key. Using the Iconyx, we were able to focus the sound to a concentrated area directly in front of the screen, rather than create a cacophony across the entire lobby.

‘The programme contains both narration and music, and the Iconyx delivers on both spoken word intelligibility and musical performance.

‘It’s also a very high-end space, and the Iconyx really fits in with the décor,’ she adds. ‘It’s an elegant, low-profile design that actually blends with the surroundings.’

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