In 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright received a letter from Hilla Rebay, the art
advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, asking the architect to design a new
building to house Guggenheim's four-year-old Museum of Non-Objective
Painting. The project evolved into a complex struggle pitting the
architect against his clients, city officials, the art world and public
opinion, but the resultant achievement testifies to both Wright's
architectural genius and the adventurous spirit of its founders. The
Guggenheim Museum is an embodiment of Wright's attempts to render the
inherent plasticity of organic forms in architecture. His inverted
ziggurat dispensed with the conventional approach to museum design,
which led visitors through a series of interconnected rooms and forced
them to retrace their steps when exiting. Instead, Wright whisked people
to the top of the building via elevator, and led them downward at a
leisurely pace on the gentle slope of a continuous ramp. The galleries
were divided like the segments of an orange, into self-contained yet
interdependent sections. The open rotunda afforded viewers the unique
possibility of seeing several bays of work on different levels
simultaneously. The spiral design recalled a nautilus shell, with
continuous spaces flowing freely one into another. Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum: An Architectural Appreciation celebrates Wright's
crowning achievement with reflections by prominent architects,
historians and critics. Paired alongside a half-century of photographs,
they convey how, as Paul Goldberger has said, "almost every museum of
our time is a child of the Guggenheim."
