Guggenheim Museum NYC

New York, NY, United States

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Guggenheim Museum NYC

New York, NY, United States

Firm

carlos llamas : architectural photography

Type

Cultural › Museum

STATUS

Built

YEAR

1959

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. The museum was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, under the guidance of its first director, Hilla von Rebay. The museum adopted its current name in 1952, three years after the death of its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim.

The museum's building, a landmark work of 20th-century architecture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, drew controversy for the unusual shape of its display spaces and took 15 years to design and build; it was completed in 1959. It consists of a six-story, bowl-shaped main gallery to the south, a four-story "monitor" to the north, and a ten-story annex to the northeast.

The main gallery contains a six-story helical ramp that extends along its perimeter, as well as a central ceiling skylight. The Thannhauser Collection is housed within the top three stories of the monitor, and there are additional galleries in the annex and a learning center in the basement. The building underwent an expansion and extensive renovations from 1990 to 1992, when the annex was built, and it was renovated again from 2005 to 2008.

The museum's collection has grown over the decades and is founded upon several important private collections, beginning with that of Solomon R. Guggenheim.

The collection, which includes around 8,000 works as of 2022, is shared with sister museums in the Spanish city of Bilbao and elsewhere. In 2013, nearly 1.2 million people visited the museum, and it hosted the most popular exhibition in New York City.

Wright's design for the Guggenheim Museum incorporated geometric motifs, such as squares, circles, rectangles, triangles, and lozenges. The massing contains two spiraling structures, the six-story main gallery to the south and the smaller "monitor" to the north, which is connected by a "bridge" on the second story. The ten-story rectangular annex, to the northeast, appears behind the spiraling structures as viewed from Central Park.

The building embodies Wright's attempts "to render the inherent plasticity of organic forms in architecture".

Wright's design included details inspired by nature, although it also expresses his take on modernist architecture's rigid geometry. Wright described a symbolic meaning to the building's shapes: "These geometric forms suggest certain human ideas, moods, sentiments – as for instance: the circle, infinity; the triangle, structural unity; the spiral, organic progress; the square, integrity
"Forms echo one another throughout oval-shaped columns, for example, reiterate the geometry of the fountain. Circularity is the leitmotif, from the main gallery to the inlays in the museum's terrazzo floors.