In October 1959, when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened the doors to its new building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, it promptly became “the obligatory topic of every New York conversation." The last built work by Frank Lloyd Wright, who had died earlier that year at 91, was not showered with praise, as one might now expect, but pelted with criticism. Almost everyone felt that the architecture of the museum dominated the paintings and the art inside. Such was the power of FLW’s architecture. Wright’s building made it socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense, almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim.
What if you get a chance to switch FLW’s masterpiece with your own expression of Guggenheim? What if you get a chance to step into the master’s shoes and be able to design an ‘architectural icon’?
