Wright’s Guggenheim Museum

Guggenheim Museum, New York (all photos by me)

Visiting New York for the first time last month made me feel like a kid in the biggest imaginable candy store, one offering urban delights and fantastical architecture of all sorts for my delectation. There was so much to see. Without a doubt, one confection I craved that did not disappoint was Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, completed in October of 1959. Wright had passed away earlier that year, so he never did see his revolutionary design in actual use, but I’ve no doubt he would have been pleased. As much as any other single building in his oeuvre, the Guggenheim is an embodiment of Wright’s grandiloquence, genius, and stature as the greatest American architect of his time. 

The Guggenheim is unlike any museum that came before it, and arguably unlike any that have followed. Its primary design conceit—the spiraling ramp—unapologetically dictated its exterior expression and how visitors should experience the works of art inside. Next to its genteel Upper East Side neighbors and across from Central Park, the museum appears as a revelation, an anomalous and subversive form that should not have been unexpected from an architect who openly loathed New York and its density. 

The story of the museum’s long gestation and the opprobrium the design received when Wright unveiled it have been well-chronicled. Many—including a number of the contemporary artists whose work was to be showcased in the building—believed the idiosyncratic building would overshadow the art and only serve the architect’s ego. Critics cited the limitations imposed by the sloped plane of the spiraling ramp, the canted walls, the low ceilings, and the shallow dimensions of the display niches. Some likened its form to a snail’s shell, while to others the Guggenheim resembled nothing if not a giant toilet bowl. Wright dismissed the detractors as unable to appreciate how it was possible to make a museum and the work it displayed an “uninterrupted, beautiful symphony such as never existed in the World of Art before.” He regarded a collection’s physical home to be as crucial a part of the museum experience as the work itself. 

In the rotunda, looking up . . .

. . . and looking down.

It’s true the limited dimensions of display niches along the ramp overly prescribe which pieces can be presented most favorably. The museum addressed this limitation by including more traditional, flat-floored and generously proportioned galleries in the 1992 addition designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates. Regardless, I did not find the fluidity and continuity of the space within and about the central rotunda distracting. The primary exhibition during my visit featured the distinctively attenuated figures sculpted by Alberto Giacometti. For these, what might have been curatorially restrictive instead seemed perfectly calibrated to the artist’s interest in existentialism and phenomenology and his frequent themes of melancholy and loneliness. Seeing the Giacometti pieces both up-close and from various levels across the rotunda, their frozen poses juxtaposed with the dynamism of the ramp and museumgoers, is exactly how I believe Wright intended the architecture and art should work together.

Part of the Giacometti exhibit

The Guggenheim is undoubtedly one-of-a-kind but is also a culmination of motifs Wright drew upon with regularity. His V.C. Morris Gift Shop in San Francisco likewise features a spiraling ramp, albeit at a much smaller scale, along which one’s perspective constantly shifts. Both designs are attempts by Wright to express the interrelatedness of time, space, and architecture through movement. 

Singling out a favorite building to highlight from my trip to New York is not unlike attempting to choose a favorite chocolate bar. The bottom line is the Guggenheim does stand out. I truly like Wright’s 5^th Avenue folly. I appreciate the design’s audacity and the controversy that would become part of the building’s legacy to this day. My opinion may be that of an architect and Frank Lloyd Wright fan, but I don’t think this is a matter of acquired taste. The Guggenheim Museum offers a visceral experience that is universally appealing.