Art: Optimistic Ziggurat

A spry old man. as regal-looking as a Shakespearean actor, arrived in Manhattan last week to show off his latest creation. Before 68 New York reporters Architect Frank Lloyd Wright unwrapped his model for “The Modern Gallery of Non-Objective Painting,” which will be built (with Guggenheim money) next spring on Manhattan’s upper Fifth Avenue (TIME, July 23 ). To some of the newsmen, impressed by Architect Wright but irreverent by nature, the model looked something like a big, white ice cream freezer.

Architect Wright has never built anything in Manhattan before. He improved the occasion by lecturing the newsmen on art & life. He called the big grey Metropolitan Museum, a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue, an “undemocratic,” outdated stone quarry. Rooms should only be about 12 ft. high, he explained, so people will not be made to feel insignificant. Pointing to his model, he sermonized: “Democracy demands this type of building. The thing you can’t get any more in church you ought to get here; the health, vitality and beauty of the human imagination.”

He added: “There is no reason why New York should keep on building with doors and windows and separate floor slabs one above the other.” His building has only two doors (both on the outside; none between rooms), one long spiral window, which winds like the floor in gradually expanding, gradually ascending circles. The museum’s wide-open interior is lighted from a dome of pyrex tubing.

Wright said he got his basic idea from Assyrian ziggurats (pyramidal temples with outside ramps ascending spirally). Eventually he decided that “the ziggurat is pessimistic,” because it is pyramidal, so he turned it upside down to get his own building. Pointing to his model, he said triumphantly: “This is pure optimism.”