Guggenheim Museum Case Study

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (1959)

In 1943, Hilla Rebay, art advisor for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new museum for the Guggenheim’s Non-Objective painting collection. Wright originally opposed the location of New York for the new Guggenheim museum, as he felt that the city was overpopulated with both buildings and people. However, he chose the site for the Guggenheim mainly for its proximity to Central Park, believing that green space served as a place of contemplation and comfort from the noise and congestion in the city.

The large, clean, circular and horizontal design of the exterior is devoid of surface ornamentation (Figure 2). When entering the museum, there is an area with a low ceiling that opens up into the large rotunda. 29 meters above the rotunda is a skylight. The works are not visible in the central atrium: visitors must experience the building before the art. In museum design, the museum usually leads visitors through a series of interconnected

The success or the failure of an art exhibition is reliant on the ability of the art piece to exist by itself on the curved wall of a sloped museum, while also making sense as a piece of the whole exhibit. Visitors’ interests were more focused on the historical context rather than appreciating the history lesson or the collection of artworks themselves, because of the small pockets of gallery spaces. This is due in large part to the museum’s unique, inflexible structure, which hinders the full function of the museum.

The Guggenheim, when designed, broke the traditional mold of architecture with its contemporary style, which frames the art in interesting, novel ways and creates new experiences, especially looking out from the ramp across the rotunda. It is successful in the sense that it draws attention to the museum, but is less successful because the museum is separate from the