Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer, and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures, 532 of which were completed. Wright believed in designing structures that were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture.

SOLOMON R GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, 1943-56

In 1943, at the age of 76, Wright was commissioned to design what was then called the Solomon R Guggenheim museum collection of Non-Objective Painting, a museum to house one of the most comprehensive collections of modern painting in the world. Construction of the building did not start until 1956, and the Guggenheim Museum remained unfinished at Wright’s death in 1959.

The scheme for the Guggenheim Museum was developed by Wright soon after receiving the commission, but none of the sites selected for consideration by the clients provided what either they or Wright considered an appropriate context.

In 1949, after considerable efforts, a site on Fifth Avenue was secured. Wright now had the entire end of a standard 200’ wide New York block between 88th

and 89th streets, facing directly west to Central Park and free of party walls on three of its four sides.

First design scheme for the Guggenheim museum,elevation; the inward turning spiral gets smaller as it ascends.

Second design scheme for the Guggenheim museum,Perspective, the glass hexagonal spiral ascends without growing smaller or larger.

Photo of preliminary model of final scheme, with Wright’s pencil modifications: note the slab tower addition.

Third design scheme, rendered as being clad in bright red-pink marble, the outward turning spiral gets larger as it ascends.

Wright’s sequence of perspective design drawings for the museum is breathtaking in its formal audacity and colorful overflowing with eager and enjoyment. The first perspective and elevation of the sequence shows a spiral that grows smaller, moving inwards as it rises, like a man-made mountain.

The color was an astonishment and a surprise. A bright pink-red that is shown glistening as if it were enameled. A white concrete tower-like volume, beveled at its top and side, cuts into the large spiral at its rear, this clearly houses the stair, and is glazed extensively with glass tubing.

Wright’s second scheme is probably represented in the perspective of a hexagonal gallery volume, its aqua-blue walls beveled out slightly and topped at each floor by continuous band of glass tubing, the whole capped by a concrete top and seated on a concrete base. This scheme apparently does not incorporate the spiraling ramp, as the floor lines do not climb as the floor lines do not climb as they move around the hexagonal volume; behind again is the beveled stair tower.

Wright’s third perspective scheme presents the space that would be found in the museum’s final design: a spiral that grows larger, moving outwards, as it rises with bands of glass-tube glazing recessed in –between the steppes sections of the spiral. In this scheme the bright pink red glossy color has returned. Yet the form lying under this red color is that of the final design, revealed in the final perspective of the sequence, a pure-white spiral lifting off the sidewalk, leaving its brown blocky neighbours behind as it ascends to the sky. A cylindrical stair tower now emerges behind the spiral, and a dome glazed with the same glass-tubing as the bands between the ramping floors peeks out of the top. In this perspective drawing, the spiral again glistens as if enameled, and the lines drawn later with pencil over the white exterior indicate that Wright was considering cladding the whole in thin marble. This idea was soon abandoned because of the client’s discretion and budget!

While Wright’s Guggenheim Museum is unique in many ways, it is interesting that other architects of the period also tuned to the spiral when designing a museum. Le Corbusier, who used a square spiral plan in the design of several museums, chose the spiral for its open-ended quality. In his Museum of the Twentieth Century he proposed as continuously expanding, like a seashell, wrapping new galleries around the old.

Wright designed a drive-through drop-off that allowed cars to enter the museum from Fifth Avenue, between the main spiral gallery to the south and the smaller ‘monitor’ to the north, exiting onto 89th

Street. Thus entry and movement of automobiles, pedestrians and visitors all penetrated in to the interior of the museum, carving into the thickness of the urban block. The floor plans Wright drew for the Guggenheim Museum show a consistent development of these paired circular volumes, a larger spiral and a smaller monitor, both set up against Fifth Avenue, a stair and elevator tower placed behind and between them.

We enter the Guggenheim Museum between the spiral and the monitor, under a horizontal single-storey-deep concrete bar that runs the length of the street front. As in all of Wright’s works, this entrance space is both low and dark. This low, dark entrance takes us, to the middle of the plan, here the original open loggia, where cars could enter and drop-off passengers, has since been glaze, and the original drive-through and sculpture garden behind has been enclosed to house the bookstore. A circular glass vestibule projects from the right, opening to the loggia and towards the sidewalk; we move under its low ceiling and out on to the floor of the main gallery, the concrete walls of the ramping floors spiraling up to the enormous skylight high overhead, which pours pure white light down into the space.

Defined by its own astonishing spiral geometry, its means of support is not visible upon entry, seeming to grow up from the ground in one continuous curve. The spiral expands as it rises, not only producing the largest floors at the top but creating a perspectival effect that makes the central space seem even taller than it actually is, hindering our efforts to understand its structure and dimension. The skylight, circular in plan and divided into twelve segments, is the width of the lowest spiral floor, allowing copious light to cascade into the space from above, washing the sides of the concrete ramp walls and emphasizing the darker voids or slots between them.

The twelve thin concrete piers set in a radial pattern in plan, which support and structure the spiral in its rise towards the skylight, were carefully retracted by Wright from the inner edge, so that the visitors can overlook the main space, and withdraws the vertical structural supports from the view upon entry, allowing us to believe for at least a moment that the concrete piers act to frame the view of the paintings hung on the outside wall, dividing the continuous ramp space into rooms defined on three sides and open to the movement zone at the inner edge of the ramp on the fourth.

Wright produced a rather astonishing series of perspectives showing how these various spaces on the ramp were to be use for the display of art. Showing the ramping display spaces from The widest space and largest number of artworks(at the top of the ramp) to the narrowest space and the single artwork respectively.

Light is introduced into the space and on to the paintings in two distinctly different ways, the main volume, lit by the skylight, is ringed by the ramp-gallery, whose inner circulation zone is illuminated from the central space while its outer wall, where the artworks are hung, is lit by a continuous band of horizontal clere stories that separate each level of the ramp from the one above it, both inside and out. The detail of the clerestories as built was simplified to an angled flat skylight outside, with integral gutter at the top of the concrete spiral wall, set over a translucent panel inside, with an electric light and reflector fitted into the space between them.

The ramp and floor, both are made of reinforced concrete, are finished with a layer of terrazzo-concrete flooring with a grid of inlaid brass circles. The interior walls are finished with a layer of plaster and painted, while Wright’s original intention of applying a thin layer of marble to the exterior was abandoned in favor of a gunned concrete sprayed against exterior forms with a PVC coating as a finish.

The Guggenheim was completed after Wright’s death, and many like of his later works, it seems to be lacking his final touch in the details, producing a somewhat vacuous quality in the spaces, an imprecise sense of scale and an uncertainty about how intentional some of the more disturbing effects are that it has on its occupants. The ramp walls, like the terrace parapet walls at Falling water, are set so low as to make many visitors uncomfortable in approaching the edge.