After closing for a two-year makeover, Frank Lloyd Wright`s Guggenheim Museum re-opens to a curious public Sunday, its swaggering spiral joined-for better and for worse-with a quiet but controversial, 10-story addition.
This $45-million match wasn`t made in heaven, but in the earthly ambition of a museum that seems bent on expansion. On the whole, the union succeeds, though not without compromising the exterior of one of Wright`s masterpieces. The New York architectural firm of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates has enhanced the inside of the Guggenheim, creating galleries the museum needs to display its world-class cache of modern art and giving visitors a chance to see spectacular, Wright-designed spaces that were hidden away like buried treasure. But the bittersweet reality is that the improvements are made possible by a 10-story addition that takes the zing out of what is arguably the finest piece of sculpture in the Guggenheim`s collection: the exterior of the museum`s stunning, spiraling rotunda.
Wright meant for it to stun. When the Guggenheim opened in 1959, six months after Wright`s death, it violated just about every architectural convention of Manhattan. Sidewalk architecture critics unfavorably likened the Guggenheim to a hot-cross bun, a washing machine and an inverted oatmeal dish. Yet as time passed, the Guggenheim became beloved, and for good reason:
In contrast to the earth-bound houses of Wright`s Prairie Style, it reached optimistically to the sky-an inverted, American version of an ancient Babylonian ziggurat.
In 1985, preservationists recoiled when museum officials announced plans for an 11-story tiled box that would cantilever over the Guggenheim`s small rotunda. The rationale for the addition was that the museum had room to show only a fraction of its ever-growing permanent collection.
Many protests and press conferences later, the Guggenheim thought better of it. In 1987, the museum replaced its first design with the present one: a 10-story limestone-clad tower housing galleries and offices.
Basing their design on Wright`s sketches for a 10-story Guggenheim annex, Gwathmey-Siegel has tried to create a ”background building” that forms a rectilinear foil for the rotunda`s upward spiral. The tower also is meant to shield the rotunda from the visual clutter of a nearby apartment house, while its ”tartan grid” echoes the city`s street grid.
In short, the $15-million addition tries to fit in with good architectural manners. And that is precisely why it falls flat.
The Guggenheim always has thrived on standing alone from its surroundings, allowing the main rotunda to rise toward the sky with little visual interference. Even if Wright intended the annex to be built, the rotunda worked best without it.
The rotunda`s rise is still spellbinding if you look at the museum from the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 88th Street, a vantage point from which the addition is barely visible. But elsewhere on Fifth, the tower looms over the rotunda, hemming in its skyward ascent and weakening its once-powerful visual punch.
Yet that is not to say that the new Guggenheim is a failure. Gwathmey-Siegel has succeeded brilliantly in restoring the inside of the original Guggenheim, in designing conventional galleries in the addition and in melding the two interiors into a whole that is more than the sum of their individual parts.
The restoration of the existing building and construction of one level of underground offices below it cost $30 million. The most dramatic success of this part of the job occurs at the top of the spiral ramp in the seven-story rotunda.
Once sealed off behind makeshift plywood walls and used as storage space, the ramp is now open, allowing visitors to culminate their upward journey along the spiral in the proper way: by surveying the grand space below them from one of the most awe-inspiring spots in Wright`s temple of space and light.
Another highlight of the restoration comes in the Guggenheim`s small rotunda, a gem of a space that for years was divvied up into pie-shaped offices and remained out of public view. Now housing first-floor museum shops and upper-level galleries, the skylit space provides more than an intimate counterpoint to the grandeur of the main rotunda. Its windows afford views onto the tree-tops of Central Park, underscoring Wright`s ever-present desire to link architecture and nature.
There are scores of similar, subtle revelations in the new Guggenheim, from a 5th-floor outdoor sculpture terrace that offers a close-up look at the rotunda to carefully crafted openings that allow visitors to see the original museum-and details like its cornice- from gallery spaces in the addition.
But such changes are simply a bonus, given the Guggenheim`s well-deserved reputation as one of the worst places to view works of art.
Wright`s spiral ramp has long made it seem that artworks were not on a
”true” plane, while nook-like display spaces frequently proved too small for the large-scale paintings and sculptures.
The new galleries improve upon this situation in many ways. They increase the museum`s exhibition space to 51,100 square feet from 31,679, allowing it to show modern masterworks to full effect in rooms up to 20 feet high. The flat-floored spaces also relieve visitors from the one-way tyranny of the ramp, allowing them to move horizontally as well as vertically through the museum.
(A new, $6-million branch of the Guggenheim, located in a brick and cast- iron building in downtown SoHo, opens Wednesday and will further expand the museum`s exhibition space by almost 31,000 square feet. Under ambitious director Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim also plans branches in Bilbao, Spain and Salzburg, Austria. It already has one in Venice.)
It is unclear whether the Guggenheim`s trove of artwork will suffer by being shuttled from branch to branch. But it is clear that art has finally had its revenge on Wright, who didn`t show much concern for it when he designed the Guggenheim`s startling shape.
Even as it diminishes the aesthetic power of the rotunda`s exterior, Gwathmey-Siegel`s addition honestly addresses the Guggenheim`s functional flaws and gives the public new glimpses of Wright`s masterly interior. That to be sure, is an imperfect union, but it is better, on balance, than what existed before.
