The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

1943

1071 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY 10128

Dorothy and I visited the Guggenheim Museum on September 18, 2018, while on a trip to the City and Long Island to attend a wedding.  I don’t remember exactly why we went to the Guggenheim Museum, but I do know it was not because it was a Frank Lloyd Wright design– we had no idea that it was.  I need to go back some day, and pay closer attention to the details of Wright’s beautiful design, and take more pictures.

Solomon R. Guggenheim commissioned the museum in 1943, but it was thirteen years before ground was broken.  Wright battled with New York City officials and their outdated building codes.  The design required more than seven hundred drawings and construction documents.  Wright’s plan called for a main gallery, the monitor building (a smaller circular structure for administrative offices), and an annex.  Wright called the exterior concrete form of the building a “ziggurat”.  Inside the gallery is a quarter-mile-long cantilevered ramp that curves continuously as it rises seventy-five feet to the roof.  The ramp design was a bone of contention from the start, with Guggenheim’s assistant Hilla Rebay (and a consortium of 21 artists) opposed to a gallery space with inclined viewing areas.  Wright finally prevailed, and the museum opened shortly after his death in 1959.

Here are the pictures I took.  I promise to go back some day and do this magnificent structure justice!