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• 1 2015-10-13T15:31:37-07:00 Guggenheim Museum, New York 24 plain 2015-12-11T08:30:27-08:00 The Guggenheim Museum is one of the most iconic of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings, and it is the last building of his that is located in New York City. It was first commissioned in June 1943 to house a collection of non-objective paintings. Building architectural wonder like this was not something Frank Lloyd Wright had been enchanted with. However, he began with his client’s wish, and erected the spiral building, close to Central Park in New York City – as close to nature as it can get. According to Wright, he wanted the building to stand apart visually from the broader city and to be exquisite rather than a disgrace.
  
  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 the materialization of Wright’s vision 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 skylight, 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 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:
  
  "The Frank Lloyd Wright Building." Guggenheim, Guggenheim Foundation, 2015. Web. 5 Nov. 2015.
  
  
• 1 2015-10-16T14:14:41-07:00 Analysis of Wright's Design Plans 10 image_header 2015-12-11T19:20:44-08:00 Growing up in the prairies of Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright developed his love of nature. His childhood experience with his distant father and the divorce of his parents were major influences in his architecture during his early years. Wright was raised by a single mother, who encouraged him to engage in design since he was a young boy. He was later influenced by feminist thinking and architectural inventions. His houses had no distinct wall that separates the rooms for the families to commute in the same space. It encouraged community over segregation and promoted equality in the household. In his earlier designs, he usually incorporated a fireplace in the middle of the house to illustrate the idea of the hearth of the family is its center.
  
  Wright’s career in the beginning stage was more traditional, which was most likely due to his apprenticeship under a traditional architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee. In 1888, he began his career as a draftsman for Architect Louis Sullivan, under whom he developed his innovative Prairie Style architecture. Wright’s goal in the creation of this style is for buildings to be in sync with nature. He thus used earthy colored bricks and low ceilings to induce the idea that buildings are born from earth. Prairie homes were also heavily influenced by Wright’s feminist thinking since they contained very few walls to divide the rooms. These homes had many windows around them, which were adorned with stained glass to be able to view nature only from the inside. For the family's privacy. Wright also carefully designed the exterior walls in order that tthe public could not peek into the house. A few examples of this include the Edwin H. Cheney House in Oakpark, Illinois and the Robie House in Chicago, Illinois.
  
  Frank Lloyd Wright also surrounded himself with the exotic art, which reflected in his architectural practice. He was especially influenced by Japanese and Mayan art and architecture. A few of the most famous examples of Wright's Mayan style architecture are the Charles Ennis House and the Holly Hock House in California. The former’s design patterns on the walls, corridors, and columns are inspired by Nunnery quadrangles in Uxamel. Some areas of the latter has visual affinities with the Mayan Temple of the Sun in Mexico. Wright also traveled to Japan and collected Japanese prints and scroll paintings, which he used to decorate his home. During his visit to this country, he designed the now-demolished Imperial Hotel inspired from various styles he had encountered in his life, including Prairie style chimneys, rough-textured walls of Mayan buildings, and the traditional Japanese architecture that contains ambulatories and screens. He also brought in the Japanese aesthetics to many of his buildings drawn and constructed in America. The most distinct example of his Japanese influence is the Research Tower at the SC Johnson headquarters, whose cantilevered floors are inspired by the roof lines of Japanese pagodas. Wright also designed the headquarters of the SC Johnson Company. The architecture of this building encourages flexibility and teamwork since the office spaces are not confined behind any type of walls. This idea can be related back to his early feminist thinking and scientific management.
  
  Later in his career, Frank Lloyd Wright also imagined unique architectural styles, but most of them were never brought to life. A few of them include ramps that can be seen at the Guggenheim Museum in New York or the David Wright House in Arizona. Many others still echoed his Prairie Style designs.
  
  Apart from architecture, he also designed furniture, rugs, and windows that would go along with the buildings he created. He designed modular furniture that can be arranged according to each owner’s taste. He also published books on design and decoration, fabrics, and paints for interior decoration, all of which would complement the architectural designs he had executed.
  
  Works Cited:
  
  "Frederick C. Robie House." Frank Lloyd Wright Trust. Web.
  "Mamah Bothwick and Edwin H. Cheney House." Frank Lloyd Wright Trust. Web.
  "The Frank Lloyd Wright Building." Guggenheim, Guggenheim Foundation, 2015. Web.
  "The Principles of Scientific Management." Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook. Web.
  Twombly, Robert. Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture. New York: Wiley, 1979. Print.