Frank Lloyd Wright's Spiral: How the Guggenheim New York Was Designed

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum in New York between 1943 and 1959: 16 years from the day Hilla Rebay, the museum's first director, commissioned him to the day the building opened, October 21, 1959, six months after his death. What he produced is a rotunda whose ramp spirals up toward a domed skylight, about a quarter mile long and climbing at three degrees, inside a shell of sprayed concrete only five inches thick. This page covers how the design came about, what the famous numbers mean, and how to look at the room once you are standing in it. Hours, tickets and the practical side live on our New York visit page. This site is independent and not affiliated with the museum or the Guggenheim Foundation.

Solomon R. Guggenheim founded his foundation in 1937, and its Museum of Non-Objective Painting opened in 1939 with Hilla Rebay as director. Rebay wanted a permanent home for a collection built around Kandinsky and abstraction, and she wanted it to feel like a temple for painting. In the museum's own words today, she asked Wright for a temple of spirit, a monument.

She had looked at European architects first. The 1990 New York City Landmarks Commission report on the building says the war made any of them a logistical and political problem, so in 1943 she chose America's best-known architect, drawn by his writing on organic architecture. Wright answered with a ziggurat-like scheme that thrilled her. He was paid $21,000 to start designing before a site had even been bought; the whole project, land included, was budgeted at about $1 million. The first piece of the present Fifth Avenue lot was purchased in the spring of 1944, and in August 1945 Wright showed his design to the clients over lunch at the Plaza Hotel.

The two of them disagreed from the start. Wright imagined a steel structure faced in red marble and brick. Rebay wanted something quieter, in subdued colors. Neither version got built, and the building's real surface, covered below, is a third thing.

The museum names three causes: changes to the design, the purchase of more land, and rising building costs after the war. Add a death and a bureaucracy. Solomon Guggenheim died late in 1949 without seeing his plans realized, and his nephew Harry F. Guggenheim took over the Foundation. Rebay's relationship with Harry was bad enough that she left the director's post. In 1952 James Johnson Sweeney became director and wanted a building that served the art, a very different brief from Rebay's temple.

The plans were also hard to approve. When they first reached the city in 1952, officials raised 32 objections under the building code. About fifteen were left by the time the file went to the Board of Standards and Appeals, which needed a long round of revisions before the city issued a permit in 1956. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation counts 749 drawings across the design's many versions.

Then nobody wanted to build it. The architect Edgar Tafel, a former Taliesin apprentice, introduced Wright to George N. Cohen of the Euclid Contracting Corporation in August 1954, and the two settled on a cheap way to make a curved building. Demolition of the old buildings on the lot began in May 1956, construction in October. The scaffolding came down in August 1958, and the exterior coating went on that October.

Not museum, if he could help it. The Landmarks report says that for the final design Wright preferred the name "Archeseum", which he explained as a building in which to see the highest. It is sometimes misquoted as "archeological museum"; that is not what he meant. He also called the building "My Pantheon," a reference to the Roman rotunda with its opening in the dome, and believed it summed up his career.

The ziggurat is the third name. The museum today quotes Wright's phrase "optimistic ziggurat": the shape is the inverse of a stepped pyramid, widening as it rises. Early schemes from 1943 to 1945 varied. One had a dome of translucent tubes over the rotunda and a ramp that contemporary accounts called "logarithmic." What survives into the final version is the idea the Landmarks report singles out: continuous, fluid movement in the structure, the space and the visitor's own route, all at once.

The ramp is not a decoration around the gallery. It is the gallery, the circulation and the structure in one piece, and most of what is unusual about the building follows from that choice.

The museum's Visitor Guide gives two numbers: the rotunda's ramp is a quarter mile long and "climbs steadily at a three-degree incline." The Landmarks report calls it a one-quarter-mile ramp that spirals up in ever-widening loops. A quarter mile is 1,320 feet, or about 400 meters. Some reference works print a slightly longer figure; we use the museum's.

The trap is the word degrees. A grade is usually quoted as a percentage, rise over run, and many sites have read "three-degree" as a three percent grade. It isn't. An angle of three degrees is a rise of about 5.2 feet per 100 feet, so roughly 5 percent. A three percent ramp would be nearly flat; the real one is a gentle climb you feel in your calves after a few levels. The figure of "18 degrees" that turns up on some travel pages cannot be right either: that would be a grade of more than 30 percent, steeper than most staircases.

Wright floated white marble in 1945, as aggregate in vertical panels or a sprayed marble-dust finish. It was never used. The shell is Gunite, a comparatively dry mix of sand and cement sprayed in layers from inside the building, through the steel reinforcement, against plywood forms. The ramp's floor slab was poured reinforced concrete. The museum describes the result as walls only five inches thick, "a stunning engineering feat," in a material usually found in tunnels and swimming pools. That is what makes the spiral possible without a forest of columns.

The engineering took years to settle. In 1946 the engineer Jaroslav Polivka tested a six-inch section and found that the curve of the ramp gave the building the strength of a shell. The design later moved to twelve concrete webs set at thirty-degree intervals around the interior. Over the Gunite, in October 1958, crews applied an ivory vinyl coating originally developed in World War II to protect guns and aircraft, sold under the trademark Cocoon.

It is not white. It is a light gray, Tnemec BF72 Platinum, according to the museum. When the building opened on October 21, 1959, it was a warm yellow-brown, chosen by Wright to match the terrazzo floors inside so the building would read as one continuous space. That color lasted about five years. A series of repaints over the following decades drifted it toward off-white.

In 2007 the Landmarks Commission examined the walls, uncovering up to 12 layers of paint, and designated a single color in perpetuity. It chose the cool light gray that people already associate with the building rather than restoring Wright's original warm yellow-brown. If you see old photographs in which the museum looks tan, that is not film color.

Wright also lost a fight inside the building. Sweeney insisted on white gallery walls. Wright wrote to Harry Guggenheim in protest that the inside and the outside of the building could not be separated, calling the idea a truth of which our culture has yet seen little and James has seen none. The galleries stayed white.

As for the fear that the slope would make paintings look crooked: the museum says works are installed at an angle of one and a half degrees, which appears straight to the human eye. Published figures for the tilt of the wall itself disagree, so we leave that number out.

Start at the bottom and look up. The museum describes the spiral ramp as rising to a domed skylight, and from the ground floor you see the loops stack toward it. Then pick a direction. Wright's intention, according to the museum's Visitor Guide, was top down: he originally specified a glass elevator so visitors could look into the rotunda while rising to level six. A museum family guide from 2015 says the same thing in plainer words, take the elevator up and stroll down the spiral. That is the architect's idea, not a rule or an instruction in the current visitor information, and recent exhibitions are often installed to be read in either direction. Check the floor plan for the show you are seeing.

Our suggestion, clearly labeled as ours: if the quarter mile sounds like a lot, ride up and walk down. The Landmarks report notes that you can also leave halfway, by the elevator or the triangular stair hall, and that the ramp lets you follow one artist or movement as it develops and then step toward the central void for perspective.

Constantly, although the spiral has not. The museum calls its building a living organism and notes that the character-defining form has stayed unchanged through additions and renovations.

In 1963 the second floor of the Monitor was converted into a gallery, later the home of the Thannhauser Collection. The Thannhauser Wing opened in 1965, and the tower annex was completed in 1968. In the 1970s the driveway was enclosed. In 1985 the Foundation's architects, Gwathmey Siegel, proposed a 162-foot tile-clad tower; the Landmarks report says public reaction was generally negative. The scheme was withdrawn in 1986. A shorter limestone version, 133 feet, was approved in October 1987, with a building permit in July 1988.

According to Wikipedia, the annex and a restoration were completed in 1992, and a further restoration of the facade and systems ended in 2008; we did not find either on a primary page. The New York City landmark designation came on August 14, 1990. In 2019 UNESCO inscribed "The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright," a listing of eight buildings, the Guggenheim among them. The Landmarks report, for its part, calls the museum Wright's only major commission in New York City.