Art: Museum a la Wright

The daring dean of modern architects announced last week that he had completed plans, and secured backing (a million dollars), for the long-contemplated Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Painting.* It sounded like a jumping-off-place for Buck Rogers, the man from the 25th Century. “It will outdo in bizarre appearance any other building in the world,” was the verdict of one appraising eye. Fiery old (76) Frank Lloyd Wright, the man who designed it, proudly says that it will be the first building ever conceived in the form of a true logarithmic spiral (descending spiral, widest at the top).

Somewhat oversimplified in Architect Wright’s description—a “steel basket shot with concrete”—the outer covering of the building will be winding bands of seamless concrete and glass, rising 100 ft. At the top, the structure will project 24 ft. beyond the ground level building-line. The interior of this huge upended cone will consist of a continuous, gradually rising, gradually widening, ramp picture-gallery ¾ of a mile long. A great glass dome will top the last wide spiral sweep.

Some Wright-announced features:

¶The museum will be “self-cleaning.” “There will be no drooling down the surface.”

¶Visitors, as they pass through the entrance vestibule, will be automatically suction-cleaned of clothing dust and shoe dirt.

¶Pictures may be hung unframed, because the temperature and humidity will be held constant at all seasons.

¶A three-foot wall recession will keep the pictures safely out of reach of the public.

¶The Museum will include a globular film theater, with cinema projectors in the floor. Films will be thrown on the ceiling, viewed by audiences lying in reclining chairs.

¶There will be an observatory “for the study of the cosmic order.”

¶The building will be fireproof, earthquake-proof, stormproof—”virtually indestructible by natural forces.”†

Dapper Dreamer Wright contends that his Non-Objective Museum will be the first ever built that is thoroughly suited to the display of pictures. Now, he says, “art will be seen as if through an open window, and of all places, in New York. It astounds me!”

* The site, already bought and paid for, is Manhattan’s upper Fifth Avenue, hard by the conventional Metropolitan Museum. The Guggenheim collection has been housed for six years in a temporary, rented building.

†Wright’s best known work, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, withstood the great Japanese earthquake but has partially succumbed to U.S. bombings. War department officials last week reported that the Imperial’s central auditorium is now completely gutted.