Moments from Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Frank Lloyd Wright was seventy-six when he started designing the Guggenheim and died six months before it opened in 1959, so he never saw the finished building that became, arguably, the most famous museum architecture in America: a smooth white spiral rising off Fifth Avenue like nothing else on the street then or now. The idea, controversial with artists at the time, was to let visitors take an elevator to the top and walk the entire collection along one continuous downward ramp, no rooms, no doors, no choice about sequence, just a single unbroken spiral with the art hung along its curving wall.

The collection's roots go back to Solomon Guggenheim's early, unfashionable enthusiasm for abstraction, pushed hard by his advisor Hilla Rebay, who convinced him to buy Kandinsky when most collectors still considered pure abstraction a passing fad rather than a serious movement. Ride to the top and walk down rather than up, the ramp's gentle grade and the light pouring in from Wright's central oculus were both designed to be experienced in that direction. The building itself fights the art for attention, curved walls were never meant to hang flat canvases comfortably, and that tension is worth noticing rather than fighting: the Guggenheim was always as much a sculpture you walk through as a container for other people's sculptures.