Word: guggenheim
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Much of his greatest work, such as New York City's Guggenheim Museum, is definitively 20th century, yet doesn't fit easily into the standard modernist canon -- Wright's buildings are too craftsmanlike, too exuberant, too strange. Was he the greatest architect of the 19th century (as the young Philip Johnson twittingly called him) or the first great one of the 20th? Even as he was, years ahead of his time, denuding interiors and dreaming up schemes for mass- produced housing, he loathed the new abstract art from its beginning. Johnson planned to include Wright in his epochal 1932 Museum...
...this reduced age, people are discombobulated by the prospect of fussing with a masterwork such as the Guggenheim. It is, after all, the greatest American architect's best-known building. And yet the Guggenheim's very singularity has always made it a wretched place to show pictures: the narrow ramp that hugs the inside wall has been the museum's main exhibition space...
...trustees decided a decade ago that they could not manage without considerable additional space, they turned to Charles Gwathmey and Robert Siegel, architects whose work (sleek, handsome, rather restrained) is not exactly Wrightian. On the 35-ft. sliver of land behind Wright's museum, Gwathmey Siegel would build the Guggenheim an addition. Ever since, the firm has been accused by a slightly hysterical mandarin consensus of desecrating the Guggenheim, of wanting to make a toothpick from a piece of the True Cross; the first design, a huge tower that brazenly cantilevered a pale green box out over Wright, was rejected...
...uncomfortable truth is that the Guggenheim has been problematic not just for curators but for visitors: the interior could be oppressive and maddeningly hermetic. Now, for the first time, the museum has complexity as well as sheer monomaniacal power. You can still keep to Wright's relentless ramp, but now you can also break away at four different levels into the new building and wander the loftlike galleries freely. Gwathmey has opened up the place, clearing away clutter and creating dozens of new architectural moments -- glimpses of Central Park, comfortably arm's-length views of the great ramp itself, details...
DESIGN: Grand New Guggenheim...