As lovers of art in 2020, we now expect our museums to resemble objects instead of temples. Previously an art museum was a revered and usually symmetrical building, historically classical and European. But by the early 20th c., most architecture was strongly influenced by the German school of the Bauhaus, and the architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohr, scions of glassed, measured, calculated, cold, and minimalist structures.
“Form followed function” was the mantra.
The French exception was Le Corbusier, already designing his structures as boats, steamships, and praying hands.
But as those Formalist proportions of rectangular shapes, vertical glass and steel towers and horizontal tracking homes became repetitions, “modern” architecture began to breathe, escaping the “box”, and became an image that transformed the land, the water and the community. This movement influenced the architects of our newer art museums, in many cases turning reality into fantasy.
In 1943 the proposal for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City was presented to the already famous American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) by Simon R Guggenheim (1861-1949), heir to the Meyer Guggenheim mining fortune.
Wright and the Guggenheim team met immediate opposition to the proposed site as stately 5th Avenue- Belle Epoch/Gilded Age mansions were demolished, scraping and replacing history and elegance with the design of a poured concrete shape (thanks to Roman engineering, 2nd c BCE) so challenging that it was difficult to find a contractor willing to take on the task.
The site is 1071 5th Avenue at 89th Street.
The proposed museum would house the mammoth collection of avant-guard art that Mr. Guggenheim had collected since the 1890s, including European paintings of the late 19th and 20th centuries and American paintings and sculpture of the 20th century. The big names are Manet, Pissaro, Gauguin, Van Gogh and 33+ Picassos, Kandinsky, Miro, and Klee. The collection has continued to grow.
Bringing nature into architecture was Wright’s mission, as evidenced in his Prairie houses of folding planes that were horizontal, sprawling, flat to the earth, filled with light and movement and without European models.
Yet New York’s congestion required verticality. The director of the Guggenheim collection, Hilla von Rebay, told Wright that she wanted a “temple of the spirit”.
Wright responded by designing a six story “object” of concrete coils, rough, absorbent of light, and WHITE (although Wright first proposed red) for a Manhattan that was dirty, noisy, overpopulated, polluted, and politically corrupt. This was laughable, questionable, arguable and unimaginable.
The museum plan was fraught with contention from neighbors and the city. The 16-year journey included 700 sketches and 6 sets of working drawings. Mr. Guggenheim died in 1949 but his heirs/foundation continued his vision.
The spiraling white ribbon, as many described it, introduced an interior cylindrical track, meant to surround and encompass, wider at the top, with an elevation of 15% that curled from a ground level pool to an oculus at the top.
There were no windows. Paintings were suspended from the wall, appearing to be level with the horizon, not the floor. The walls tilted out and were curved, the floor tilted up. Sculptures were even more problematic, as they needed to at least “appear” level, and there was a “trick of the eye” for this, using small platforms at a compensating angle (but not level) that gave the appearance of stability and balance. Amazingly, it is not disorienting.
Looking at the interior, it is a series of “niches” divided by walls of support, light coming underneath each “elevation”. These spaces limited the size of the exhibited art and challenged appropriate illumination.
Art lovers were inspired to describe it – a snail, a nautilus shell, a flying sauces, a curl of paper, a ribbon, a compressed folding cup, a whirling ziggurat – all inverted.
Critics said that the building dominated the art. Twenty artists petitioned against their work being shown there.
What is remarkable is that the design of this building has no relation to its function. And yet it was, at the opening, widely praised.
Frank Lloyd Wright died six months before, in October, 1959.
The museum was renovated in 1992, adding a 10-story rectangular tower that housed 4 additional galleries with flat walls.
In 2019 it was named a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Who would have thought!
In October, 1997, 38 years later, across the Atlantic, on the river Nervion and in the heart of the Basque region in the city of Bilbao, Spain, is the most spectacular and awe-striking museum in the Guggenheim Foundation.
Unlike the New York Guggenheim, this museum was a financial and cultural venture between the City of Bilbao and the Foundation, and was hailed, welcomed, praised and celebrated. It changed not only a river and a city, but a country.
Interestingly, the Basque government approached the Guggenheim Foundation.
The city of Bilbao, an industrial shipyard of coal and steel, was depleted, drying up, and yet it held a strategic position as a port in northern Spain. The Basque government offered to pay the construction cost and create a trust of $50 million, to pay $20 million to the Guggenheim Foundation and to give 12 million annually to the budget.
The Guggenheim Foundation, in response, agreed to promote and manage, to provide the art and to organize changing exhibits.
The Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry was hired.
There has not been and will not ever be anything like this. It has no previous architectural references. It is seen as the merging of artistic freedom and technology. It is the “Gran Prix” for museum architecture.
Old dockyards and rusty buildings were demolished, and promenades and green spaces added, and within a block, shops, tapas bars, restaurants, elegant hotels and universities were enhanced in an already existing city.
The use of CAD (computer aided design) started in the 1990s and was first used by the French in the aerospace industry.
Gehry was able to experiment with various materials, eliminating copper and lead due to the toxicity, and eventually selected Spanish limestone (a quarry near Granada), glass, and titanium as the exterior surface materials.
The titanium plates were not only lighter and stronger, but the steel supported shapes were more resistant to heat and weather and projected reflected light and changing color, floating, twisting, squeezing, stretching and reclining in waves, arches and ellipses. Assembled, they look like shingles or a crazy quilt of taffeta and satin. No two pieces are the same.
Gehry’s plans were sent to fabricators who fed them into computer/robotic equipment. This kept the cost down and also sped production.
Consequently, Gehry’s “dream ship” is seen as an angel alighting, a bird, a fish, two fish, multiple boats, musical symbols, shards of pottery and an alien spaceship – a modern medieval Crac de Chavalier with a moat – strategic, organic, dynamic – a talisman for the city.
Construction took four years and it opened on time in 1997.
The museum is 260,000 square feet. The exhibition space of 19 galleries, some rectangular and some irregular, is 120,000 square feet.
The exhibits display the most prominent names of contemporary art, with one gallery devoted entirely to Spanish and Basque artists.
Gehry describes the atrium as a “blossoming flower”. The height is 164’. (Notre Dame’s nave is 115’.)
The interior is filled with skylights, reflective surfaces, glass walls, niches, stairwells, glass elevators, and suspended wings of titanium gestures. There is no “order” once inside. Its galleries invite the visitor to discover not only the most acclaimed arts of the last 150 years but also to absorb their mystery in this constellation of NOW.
This museum is ALIVE.
If you have not visited these monuments of creativity, add them to your ever growing “bucket lists”.
Credits: Wikipedia. Also the official sites for the New York Guggenheim and the Guggenheim Bilbao were used for dates, dimensions and past history.