Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Fifth Avenue, New York
Ajay Suresh from New York, NY, USA, CC BY 2.0

Wright’s museum on Fifth Avenue is a white spiral that widens as it rises. Visitors take the lift up and walk down a sloping ramp around an atrium. The building broke with everything around it and became Wright’s last major work.

The art collector Solomon R. Guggenheim and his adviser, the artist Hilla Rebay, wanted a museum for abstract art and engaged Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943. The project was delayed by the war, the city’s building regulations and disputes. Construction began in 1956, and the museum opened in October 1959, six months after Wright’s death.

The main building is a concrete spiral that becomes wider as it rises. Inside, a ramp runs in six turns around a great atrium with a glass dome. The art hangs along the walls of the ramp, and visitors can see works on several levels at once. The slope of the ramp and the curve of the walls have been criticised by artists and curators, who felt the building competes with the art. A lower rotunda at the side houses administration and more rooms. A taller addition behind the museum was built in 1992 by Gwathmey Siegel.

The museum was restored in 2005–2008. Since 2019 it has been part of the World Heritage Site of Wright’s 20th-century architecture. The building has become as famous as the collection and contributed to the idea of the museum as an architectural landmark, an idea since followed by, among others, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.