925. Frank Lloyd Wright, Guggenheim Museum,

New York, New York, 1956-1959 (U.S.A.)

One of the great landmarks of 20th-century architecture, the Guggenheim Museum was also one of Wright’s last undisputed masterworks. Though Wright himself did not like modern painting (and actively despised New York City), he accepted the commission to design a new home for a famous collection of abstract, or ‘non-objective,’ works of art. From the outside the Guggenheim appears as a strikingly original composition, its upper portion articulated as a top-heavy helix. Its emphatic rotundity was certainly intended by Wright as a riposte to the pervasive rectilinearity of surrounding buildings and indeed of the Manhattan grid itself. The raison d’être for this unusual configuration was the conceit of a giant ramp: spiraling up around a sky-lit atrium, it would allow visitors to experience the works of art in a continuous historical sequence. A common complaint here is that the architecture overshadows the art, and some critics have seen the museum as formalistic, self-indulgent and nonfunctional; the Guggenheim did, however, establish a long-lived precedent for the commissioning of art museums of unconventional form and name-brand prestige.