In 2021, when the pandemic will hopefully be behind us, one building on the two-block site that forms the Denver Art Museum turns 50. Its age is significant but its architect even more so: Gio Ponti. Furthermore, it’s the late Italian designer’s only completed building in North America, a commission he received in 1965 when he was 74.

Breaking with traditional museum archetypes, Ponti conceived the seven-story North Building, as it was then called, as a castlelike structure, with eclectic window openings, a mountain-view rooftop terrace, and 24 facades, the latter clad in more than a million reflective glass tiles.