Review: The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright's Iconoclastic Masterpiece

Abstract

Completed in 1959, the Guggenheim Museum in New York is young for a building with the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A monument of such importance generates many histories, from its commission to its evolving role in culture and society. Lest we think the museum's history is complete, its curatorial department issued a provocative public letter in June 2020 demanding that the Guggenheim address those of its practices that enable racism and other forms of discrimination, placing that call within a national movement for systemic change.1 In light of the museum's role as a cultural power broker, it is increasingly important that we understand the multiple meanings of its building. While issues of race and discrimination unfold and demand redress, critics and historians can turn to Francesco Dal Co's synthetic monograph for an insightful interpretation of the Guggenheim in the context of New York City and in the evolving histories of modern art.Revised from the Italian edition, Il tempo e l'architetto (Mondadori, 2004), updated through 2016, and translated by Sarah Melker, the book consists of eight chapters, an extensive portfolio of photographs and drawings, and a bibliographic essay in lieu of endnotes. Unfortunately, it lacks an index, which hinders scholarly reference. It is a concise 35,000 words, handsomely designed and of a comfortable format. The text follows a chronological development with interwoven interpretive passages. The author brings decades of experience as a critic, editor, and theorist to bear in not only distilling an extensive body of literature but also analyzing with acute perception the building's design history and its multivalent meanings. The subtitle is significant: the anticipated adjective Iconic is replaced with Iconoclastic, a hint that the author returns often to the root meanings of words and thereby repositions our understandings of the building as a breaker of idols, not an object of worship.Dal Co sets the book's tone with an epigraph quoting the comments of sculptor Richard Serra, who asserts that there is no “possibility for architecture to be a work of art…. Architecture as a work of art is a contradiction in terms.” In chapter 1 the author sets out to refute this claim by proposing that, rather than make a binary choice, we examine the Guggenheim building through the agency of time. Only by looking at the duration of sixteen years of debate, design, and construction filled with tension and conflict can we comprehend its multiple meanings. In his second chapter Dal Co introduces Solomon R. Guggenheim and describes how Hildegard (Hilla) Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, his artistic adviser, chose Wright in 1943, from among other contenders, for the commission to house Guggenheim's collection of nonobjective art. Dal Co could have added that Rebay had seen Wright's architectural exhibition organized by Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin in 1931, had read his books, and had met his sister, Maginel Barney, who lived in Greenwich Village.2 In chapter 3 the author puts the building's design process into the context of tensions with the Museum of Modern Art as it pursued its agenda to define modern art. While MoMA focused on objects’ aesthetics, Guggenheim and Rebay intended, according to Dal Co, to create not a museum but “a place suitable to welcome an artistic community and to educate the public, sharing the conviction that non-objective art could only be appreciated in unusual spaces, an environment that enhances spiritually” (20).The future of the modern city backgrounded the question of what and where the Guggenheim museum would be. Wright's contract initially charged him with finding the building site, and in 1943 he suggested an 8-acre plot at Henry Hudson Memorial Park in Riverdale in the Bronx. It would allow for gardens and courts immersed in nature and freed from what he called the “tyranny of the skyscraper.” Dal Co asserts that Wright's idealized locale was the equivalent of his conception for Broadacre City, a place where “mechanization takes command” (24). Dal Co cites Lewis Mumford as the source of this phrase, but it was Sigfried Giedion who coined it later for his book Mechanization Takes Command (1948). Mumford had begun writing on the subject in 1930, and he published his critique as Technics and Civilization in 1934.3 A lot at Fifth Avenue and the south corner of Eighty-Ninth Street was chosen for the museum in 1944, but it was not until 1951 that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation assembled the full, final site between Eighty-Eighth and Eighty-Ninth Streets, opposite Central Park (22).In chapter 4 Dal Co discusses precedents for Wright's spiraling design. He points to Wright's overlooked research tower for the S. C. Johnson & Son Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin, designed and built 1943–50. That building's construction coincided with the design development of the Guggenheim, and Wright transferred its dome over a reception area—a series of concentric circles with decreasing diameters—to the oculus of the Guggenheim. The theme of the spiral also articulated the interior of the V. C. Morris Gift Shop in San Francisco (1948–49). Wright's first use of a spiral floor plan occurred in his design for the Automobile Objective for Gordon Strong in 1924, a project for motoring tourists that was canceled by the client. Dal Co also mentions Wright's awareness of Le Corbusier's 1929 Mundaneum project, with its spiraling global museum. However, he dismisses the claim that Wright was thinking then of the spiral for a museum, citing at most a “conceptual affinity” between the Guggenheim and the Musée Mondiale (75).4 Wright apparently had no museum in mind when he designed the Automobile Objective for Strong, but he did include in its interior a cutting-edge planetarium. All it would have taken to start transforming the failed project into a museum was an invitation. That invitation came fourteen years later from Hilla Rebay.In chapter 5 Dal Co elaborates on the design phases beginning in 1943, even before the museum site was chosen. Although six reworkings would follow, Wright defined his basic strategy in two perspective drawings shown to Guggenheim by 1944. The variations he tested confirm that a specific urban site was almost irrelevant, as Wright intended the building to defy every building convention and context that defined New York's architecture. According to Wright's own theory, an organic building must grow out of its site, yet this building grew before its site was selected. Dal Co resolves this paradox by returning to the original meaning of genius loci. As articulated by George Dumézil in Archaic Roman Religion, the phrase meant a condition of “scarcity, or language's incapacity to name the supernatural being appearing in a specific place” (60). The marvel of the museum on its site is precisely its refusal to limit the language of any spiritual resonance it generates. That the building still enhances a spiritually powerful art has been proved over time by many exhibitions, including the 2018–19 show of Hilma af Klint's paintings.5Dal Co treats briefly in chapter 6 the transition from the death of Solomon Guggenheim to the appointment of James Johnson Sweeney as the replacement for the ousted Hilla Rebay. A series of challenges simultaneously arose, including budgetary pressure and a name change, from the Museum of Non-Objective Painting to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. After Guggenheim's death, the museum's board and new director changed course to expand the institution's collecting policy in emulation of MoMA, its major rival. Meanwhile, Wright adhered to the original programmatic conception of the museum, as Sweeney, who had been a curator at MoMA from 1935 to 1947, relentlessly opposed Wright's every move.6 Wright saw Sweeney as establishing an “orthodox order” (108), a phrase indicating Wright's prescient perception of a codification of modern art whose authority would produce a canon and ultimately a calcification of art.In chapter 7 the discussion of technical issues of construction may challenge readers unfamiliar with the basic principles of statics, but it returns historical inquiry to the fact that architecture is a built phenomenon manifesting, overtly or not, load and support. Drawing on the structural analysis of the engineer Tomaso Trombetti, the research of Joseph Siry, and the observations of George Segal, the builder, Dal Co addresses a basic question: What supports the spiral ramp as it rises and has no connections along its interior edges? Using a series of diagrams showing intersecting lines of force, Dal Co explains that instead of the ramp being a single curving flat beam, it is U-shaped and has two components, a lower portion of three sections supported by a collar extending to ground and an upper range of nine sections tied to giant hairpin-shaped beams in the dome. In a sleight of hand, the ramp appears to be a continuous ribbon wrapping around the central space.In his final chapter Dal Co concludes where he began with the dichotomy of art versus architecture. He argues that the Guggenheim museum manifests more than this banal binary to demonstrate an attack on iconoclasm “not aimed at the images but at the forms of worship that made art its object” (109). That worship Wright saw as an orthodoxy embodied by the Museum of Modern Art and its minions. It is a conflict not merely between art and architecture but also between orthodoxy's valorization of images and the rejection of their power over the viewer. The building is thus a protest operating at multiple levels: a resistance to the hegemony of the modernist canon as it was evolving, a defiance of authority with its demands to conform, a gnomic expression of archaic spiritual force, and, as Dal Co suggests, a metaphor for Wright's long life. The curators of the Guggenheim's future might keep these perspectives in mind as they address the museum's supremacist orientation.