In June 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright received a letter
from Hills Rebay, the art adviser to Solomon R. Guggenheim,
asking the architect to design a new building to house
Guggenheim’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
opinions. Both Guggenheim and Wright would die before the
building’s 1959 completion. The resultant achievement, the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, testifies not only to Wright’sarchitectural
genius, but also to the adventurous spirit that characterized its
founder.
Wright made no secret of his disenchantment with Guggenheim’s
choice of New York for his museum: “I can think of several more
desirable places in the world to build this great museum, “Wright
wrote in 1949 to his partner, “but we will have to try New York.” To
Wright, the city was overbuilt, overpopulated, and lacked architectural
merit. Still, he proceeded with his client’s wishes, considering
locations on 36th Street, and Park Avenue(all in Manhattan), as well
as in the Riverdale section of Bronx, before setting on the present
site on Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Streets. Its nearness
to Central Park was key. As close to nature as one gets in New
York, the park offered relief from the noise and congestion of the city.
Wright’s design put his unique stamp on Modernist Architecture’s
rigid geometry. The building is a symphony of triangles, ovals, arcs,
circles, and squares. The delicate vision took decades to be fulfilled.
Some people, especially artists, criticized Wright for creating
a museum environment that might overpower the art inside. “On
the contrary,” he wrote, “it was to make the building and the painting
an uninterrupted, beautiful symphony such as never existed in the
world of art before.”
In conquering the regularity of geometric design and combining
it with the plasticity of nature, Wright produced a vibrant building
whose architecture is as refreshing now as it was 40 years. The
Guggenheim is arguably Wright’s most eloquent presentation and
certainly the most important building of his late career.
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