THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

New York, NY

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, known as The Guggenheim, is an art museum located at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern and contemporary art. Guggenheim, a member of a wealthy mining family, had been collecting works of the old masters since the 1890’s, wrote a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, asking him to design a structure to house and display his collection. Wright accepted the opportunity to experiment with his organic style in an urban setting. It took him 15 years, 700 sketches, and six sets of working drawings to create the museum. From 1943 to early 1944, Wright produced four different sketches for the initial design. While one of the plans had a hexagonal shape and level floors for the galleries, all the others had circular schemes and used a ramp continuing around the building. The spiral design recalled a nautilus shell, with continuous spaces flowing freely one into another. Even as it embraced nature, Wright’s design also expresses his take on modernist architecture's rigid geometry. Wright ascribed 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."

This sketch was done from a bench across 5th Avenue, on the same day as The Oculus sketch. Pour me a double, please. Two shots of pure architectural adrenaline