Frank Lloyd Wright's only museum took 15 years and 700 sketches
Hilla von Rebay wanted a temple of spirit for abstract art, and in 1943 she and Solomon Guggenheim wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright, although she assumed he was dead. He was 76 and very much alive. The spiral he designed for Fifth Avenue took fifteen years to finish, doubled its budget and reshaped what museums could look like.
Solomon R. Guggenheim came from a rich mining family and collected old masters from the 1890s. Meeting Rebay in 1926 changed everything: she introduced him to European abstraction, which she saw as spiritual and utopian, and he pivoted to artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, first showing the works in his Plaza Hotel apartment. He set up his foundation in 1937, and in 1939 it opened the Museum of Non-Objective Painting on East 54th Street, with Rebay as director.
Wright was hired in June 1943 on a 10 percent commission for a project meant to cost at least $1 million. Because the site was in a city, he had to build upward rather than spread out, a break from his rural work. Early schemes included one hexagonal design with flat floors, but he settled on a continuous ramp, calling the idea an inverted ziggurat. The Fifth Avenue plot facing Central Park, bought in March 1944, turned out roughly 25 feet narrower than he expected.
Wartime material shortages and rising postwar costs stalled construction, and Wright and Rebay argued over details such as how paintings should hang. The building finally opened in 1959, once Wright had filled over 700 sketches and produced six full rounds of working plans, at double the original estimate. Its six-story helical ramp winds beneath a central skylight. Critics disliked the odd galleries at first, but opinion later swung strongly in its favour, and Paul Goldberger argued that nearly every modern museum descends from it.
The museum took its founder's name in 1952, three years after his death. Its holdings, about 8,000 works as of 2022, grew from private collections including those of Justin Thannhauser and Robert Mapplethorpe and are shared with sister museums in Bilbao and Venice. Nearly 861,000 people visited in 2023.
Source: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
