|
The GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
|
|
|
|
Mr. Wright himself said, "A museum should be one extended well-proportioned floor space from bottom to top--a wheelchair going around and up and down, throughout. No stop's anywhere and such screened divisions of the space gloriously lit within from above as would deal appropriately with every group of paintings or individual paintings as you might want them classified..." And to see the paintings from up close, or from across the museum on the ramp opposite, either slightly up or slightly down, were sights never before seen in a museum--and allowed a deeper understanding of the paintings. Robert McCarter, in his book on Frank Lloyd Wright, sums up the Guggenheim Museum better than I can. He said, "It was Wright's lifelong propensity to transform all building tasks entrusted to him--whatever their purpose--into the creation of sacred spaces, thereby reconnecting to the ancient understanding of building itself as a sacred act. (After the second fire at Taliesin once again burned the house but did not touch the drafting room, Mr. Wright said, "Well, perhaps the work is sacred and the fire somehow was kept from it, but obviously my character is flawed and my home burned.") This is (sacredness) nowhere more evident than in the Guggenheim Museum, which through this process may be understood to have become itself art of the highest order. The aspects common to all Wright's public buildings which give them their sacred |
character--introverted, vertically-oriented volumes lit largely or solely from above--are in turn complemented by the articulation within the interior space of ritual circulation patterns particular to the building's use. In the Guggenheim Museum, it is the movement of the spectator to the art that orders the building's space and form. The spiral ramp becomes the unifying architectural experience, bringing the art and the spectator together, bathed in a cascade of light and suspended in a ceaselessly moving space." |
|
| < 1 2 3 4 5 | ||
 |
||
