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Inspiration
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
The Guggenheim Museum grew out of the art-collecting activities of Solomon R. Guggenheim (1861–1949), who was part-heir to a fortune made in the American mining industry by his father, Meyer Guggenheim. Solomon began collecting abstract art in the 1920s, and in 1939 he founded the Museum of Non-Objective Painting to display his collection in New York City. This museum, which was owned and operated by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, was renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952.
In 1959 the museum received a permanent home in an innovative new building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The building represents a radical departure from traditional museum design, spiraling upward and outward in smoothly sculptured coils of massive, unadorned white concrete. The exhibition space of the interior consists of a spiral ramp of six “stories” encircling an open centre space lighted by a dome of glass supported by stainless steel. Many of the paintings are “floated” from the inclined outer wall on concealed metal arms.
FALLINGWATER
MILL RUN, PENNSYLVANIA
Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., a department store magnate, and his wife, Liliane, commissioned Wright to design a weekend retreat on the family’s land near the former Bear Run community southeast of Pittsburgh. Kaufmann had been introduced to Wright by his son, Edgar, in 1934, when the latter participated in Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship, a training program for architects and artists. Wright was 67 at the time of the meeting, with few commissions in the midst of the Great Depression. His career was seemingly near retirement—the early success of his Prairie style residences in the first decade of the 1900s had abated following the negative publicity of his personal life. Wright’s design for Fallingwater, however, proved that he still maintained a bold vision for architecture. Kaufmann and his wife expected a weekend house that would offer views of a favourite waterfall, but they were startled to find that Wright’s plans situated the house directly above the waterfall. Wright argued that he did not want to relegate the falls to a mere view on which the Kaufmanns might occasionally look from afar, but that he wanted to bring the falls to the family’s everyday life. By situating the residence over the waterfall, the Kaufmanns would always be able to hear the movement of the water and be aware of the waterfall’s presence.
TALIESIN WEST
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA
![Taliesin West was architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school in the desert from 1937 until his death in 1959 at the age of 91. Today it is the main campus of the School of Architecture at Taliesin[3] and houses the Frank Lloyd Wright…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a8dc89980bd5e30fc2210eb/1519316167489-MFW53FZP2AXQ7JV1MAR4/Fank.jpg)
Taliesin West was architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school in the desert from 1937 until his death in 1959 at the age of 91. Today it is the main campus of the School of Architecture at Taliesin[3] and houses the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship began to "trek" to Arizona each winter in 1933. In 1937 Wright purchased the plot of desert land that would soon become Taliesin West.
Wright felt very strongly about the connection to the desert. He said: “Arizona needs its own architecture… Arizona’s long, low, sweeping lines, uptilting planes. Surface patterned after such abstraction in line and color as find 'realism' in the patterns of the rattlesnake, the Gila monster, the chameleon, and the saguaro, cholla or staghorn – or is it the other way around—are inspiration enough.” The structure's walls are made of local desert rocks, stacked within wood forms, filled with concrete. Wright always favored using the materials readily available rather than those that must be transported to the site.
Natural light also played a major part in the design. In the drafting room, Wright used translucent canvas to act as a roof (later replaced by plastic because of the intense wear from the Arizona sun). In the south-facing dining room, Wright did not take the masonry walls from floor to ceiling, and designed the roof to hang past the walls preventing unwanted sun rays from penetrating but allowing for horizontal light to pass through the room. Wright believed natural light aided the work environment he had his apprentices in, keeping the inside of his building in touch with the natural surroundings.