Similarly, a Wright house contained, along with private bedrooms and baths, an emphasis on unbroken communal spaces-a living room that flowed into a kitchen, for example-unknown in domestic residences when he began his practice in the Victorian era.
In that context, angled seating allowed audience members to concentrate on the stage and simultaneously function as part of the larger group. A central theme that pervades his architecture is a recurrent question in American culture: How do you balance the need for individual privacy with the attraction of community activity? Everyone craves periods of solitude, but in Wright's view, a human being develops fully only as a social creature. In his unshakable optimism, messianic zeal and pragmatic resilience, Wright was quintessentially American. To Wright's way of thinking, any building, if properly designed, could be a temple. And before it reappeared in Beth Sholom, what he called "reflex-angle seating"-in which the audience fanned out at 30-degree angles around a projecting stage-was an organizing principle in his theater plans, starting in the early 1930s. The large communal room with overhead lighting that is the centerpiece of Unity Temple was an idea he had introduced in the Larkin Company Administration Building (1902-6), a mail-order house in Buffalo, New York. In his religious buildings, he used many of the same devices-bold geometric forms, uninterrupted public spaces and oblique-angled seating-as in his secular ones. But in everything he undertook, the goal of enhancing and elevating the human experience was always on Wright's mind. These included actual places of worship, such as Unity Temple (1905-8) for a Unitarian congregation in Oak Park, Illinois, one of the early masterpieces that proclaimed Wright's genius, and Beth Sholom Synagogue (1953-59) in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, which, like the Guggenheim, he supervised at the end of his life. In Rebay's words, the two were seeking "a temple of spirit, a monument" and Wright, through his long career, was a builder of temples and monuments. When Solomon Guggenheim, the heir to a mining fortune, and his art adviser, Hilla Rebay, decided to construct a museum for abstract painting (which they called "non-objective art"), Wright was a natural choice as architect. Passive solar heating, open-plan offices, multi-storied hotel atriums-all are now common, but at the time Wright designed them they were revolutionary. A retrospective exhibition at the original Guggenheim (until August 23) reveals how often Wright pioneered trends that other architects would later embrace. Four decades later, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao-the curvaceous, titanium-clad affiliated museum in northern Spain-would launch a wave of cutting-edge architectural schemes for art institutions across the globe. Time has indeed shown the Guggenheim's tilted walls and continuous ramp to be an awkward place to hang paintings, yet the years have also confirmed that in designing a building that bestowed brand-name recognition on a museum, Wright was prophetic. The grandiloquent tone and unwavering self-assurance are as much Wright trademarks as the building's unbroken and open space. "On the contrary, it was to make the building and the painting a beautiful symphony such as never existed in the world of Art before." "No, it is not to subjugate the paintings to the building that I conceived this plan," Wright wrote to Harry Guggenheim, a Thoroughbred horse breeder and founder of Newsday who, as the benefactor's nephew, took over the project after Solomon's death.
He had devoted 16 years to the project, facing down opposition from a budget-conscious client, building-code sticklers and, most significantly, artists who doubted that paintings could be displayed properly on a slanting spiral ramp. Guggenheim Museum opened in New York City 50 years ago, on Octosix months before, Wright died at the age of 92.
The reinforced-concrete spiral known as the Solomon R. © 2009 The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizonaįrank Lloyd Wright's most iconic building was also one of his last.
"The strange thing about the ramp-I always feel I am in a space-time continuum, because I see where I've been and where I'm going," says the director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives. The Guggenheim was Wright's crowning achievement.
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