Originally named the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (or simply, ‘the Guggenheim’) marks the crowning glory of architect Frank Llyod Wright’s illustrious career.
The New York art gallery was like nothing the world had ever seen, its Japanese-inspired, nautilus shell-like design incorporating a gentle, quarter-mile continuous interior ramp that, rather than split the museum into separate galleries, allowed visitors to admire its treasures from one continuous swooping walkway. The multi-award-winning museum, the youngest ever building to be named a New York Landmark, opened in 1959, six months after its designer’s death aged 91 years (and 10 years after the passing of the businessman and art collector after who it was named). Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger notes that “almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim”. In 2019, the Guggenheim was inscribed on the Unesco World heritage List as part of The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Llyod Wright, an eight-strong collection of buildings noted for their ‘Outstanding Universal Value’. The museum is also one of several of Wright’s US National Historic Landmarks.
Its Japanese-inspired, nautilus shell-like design incorporating a gentle, quarter-mile continuous interior ramp that, rather than split the museum into separate galleries.
AMERICA’S ARCHITECT
Wright’s Unesco entry also marked the USA’s first modern architecture designation, and one of only 24 from the country. Gordon says that such recognition confirms how important he was “to the development of modern architecture around the world”.
Though the Guggenheim is undoubtedly the architect’s most famous building, many with a deeper interest in design would likely name his iconic house, Fallingwater – also on that Unesco list and another National Historic Landmark – as his signature offering.
“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature,” Wright said. “It will never fail you.” Nothing better symbolises his love of the natural world – and his masterful incorporation of it – than this 1930s house. The epitome of ‘organic architecture’, Fallingwater is perched atop a waterfall surrounded by Pennsylvanian forest. Locally sourced sandstone forms cantilevered terraces that merge magically with the surrounding whispering foliage and the cascading curtain of water below, all of which may be admired from balconies, floating stairways, or through massive glass walls.
“Great architecture, like any great art, ultimately takes you somewhere that words cannot take you at all,” notes Paul Goldberger. “… there is something that I can’t entirely say when it comes to what Fallingwater feels like.” He compares the home to Chartres Cathedral, while the American Institute of Architects’ labels Fallingwater “the best all-time work of American architecture” and Wright “the greatest American architect of all time”.
Over his lifetime, the prolific architect designed more than 1,000 buildings, around half of which were constructed. “The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes,” Frank Llyod Wright once mused, and what inspiring beauty he has left behind.
HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE
Though Wright had stints in California, New York, and Japan, he spent much of his life in the Midwest, where he was born, on 8 June 1867 in Richland Center. After studying civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, the architect set up his own practice in Chicago in 1893 where he built Robie House, another National Historic Landmark and Unesco Heritage Site. The 1909 dwelling is an example of Prairie style architecture – pioneered by Wright on his way to becoming the ‘father of American modernism’ – noted for its unmistakable horizontal lines that reflected the sprawling horizons of the Midwest landscape. It also birthed his philosophy of ‘organic architecture’, the notion that buildings should embrace and complement their environment (“I believe in God,” he wrote in his book Truth Against the World, “only I spell it Nature”).
“The relationship of inhabitants to the outside became more intimate,” said Wright of Prairie. “Landscape and building became one, more harmonious; and instead of a separate thing set up independently of landscape and site, the building with landscape and site became inevitably one.”
The turn of the 20th century was a time when US building designs still leaned heavily on the unoriginal grandeur of Old Europe, with architects holding on tightly to the past. And so Wright arrived like a wrecking ball that only swung forwards towards the future, and never looked back.
“Wright was a progressive American architect who began working at a time when ‘American’ architecture didn’t really exist yet,” Barbara Gordon, executive director of the Frank Llyod Wright Building Conservatory, tells Architectural Digest. “He wanted to create a new architecture that embraced natural, organic principles and exemplified American democracy, and his revolutionary design ideas still reverberate in the spaces where we live, work, and worship today.”
