Guggenheim Museum, New York
The building was completed about two years after its construction began, and the museum was finally opened in 1959. On the very first day of its opening, many visitors came to the museum to glimpse the interior of Wright's creation. What they saw was not a typical maze of white boxes or the inside of a "washing machine" that they was implied by its external appearance. Instead, they saw Wright’s vision materialized as written in his letter to Hilla Rebay, the art advisor to the Solomon R. Guggenheim foundation: “the whole thing will either throw you off guard entirely or be just about what you have been dreaming about” (quotations from the Guggenheim Museum website).
The building was made of concrete and is approximately 96 feet tall. Above the central lobby is the skylightcircular shape and the curves of the rotunda, from which natural light floods the building. The circular shape and the curves of the rotunda are also echoed in the shapes of the lobby desk, the columns, and the bronze drinking fountains. The repetition of forms creates an organic sense of harmony throughout the building, one of the signatures of Wright's designs.
The presence of ramps in Wright’s building had already been imagined as part of the designs for his unbuilt projects, including the Point Park Civic Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and an opera house in Baghdad, Iraq. Many of them were brought to life in many of his later works, such as David Wright House and the Sol Friedman House. The design of the spiral ramps at the Guggenheim, on the other hand, were thought to have been inspired from the Mesopotamian zigguarts. The spiraling effect of the Guggenheim instills the transcendent feeling in the viewers, drawing them to look upwards. It gives a visitor a sense of compression of the space as he enters through the doors at the bottom of the ramp, feeling minute and intimate at the same time.
Besides the light source from the skylight, Wright made continuous strips of lay lights as second source of illumination. These were designed as windows along the top of each ramp in order that natural light can illuminate the artworks. However, the galleries are lit today with artificial bulbs since the ultraviolet light from the sun can harm the works.
The exterior walls of the museum angle out, which can be felt from the upper ramps. These curved walls are merely five inches thick. These walls fit Wright’s idea of free flowing architecture, but they do not correspond to the types of art works created and the linearity of exhibition systems present during the time. Shortly after its construction, groups of unsatisfied artist sent letters of protest to the museum officials, claiming that the interior structure of this building was not suitable for the traditional display of paintings and sculptures.
However, due to the spiraling ramp, visitors are given new ways of seeing an art work from different angles and levels as the space flows freely throughout the museum. They can revisit a particular work without even going back to the same location as they move on to the other side of the ramp. The adaptability of Wright’s design is more evident in works created later. Contemporary artists attempted and succeeded in transforming the space altogether with their art work, such as artist Cai Guo Qiang’s site-specific exhibition in 2008 called I Want To Believe, which utilized the Wright’s architecture as part of his work. Such form of adaptation is what Wright would have wanted it when he envisioned this building as a functional structure.
Works Cited:
"Cai Guo-qiang: I Want to Believe." Past Exhibitions, Guggenheim Museum, 2008. Web.
"The Frank Lloyd Wright Building." Guggenheim, Guggenheim Foundation, 2015. Web.
