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Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: An Architectural Appreciation

Foreword by Stephen Hoban

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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 Guggenheimâ€™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 Wrightâ€™s architectural genius and the adventurous spirit of its founders. The Guggenheim Museum is an embodiment of Wrightâ€™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 Wrightâ€™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, â€œalmost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim.â€