Spiraling Summit

Frank Lloyd Wright’s single New York City public building is not a swaggering, self-glorifying monument but rather a kind of Rosetta stone to interpret a lifetime of ideas, argues a new book.

- Kelly Chan

In October 1959, when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened the doors to its new building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, it promptly became “the obligatory topic of every New York conversation,” noted the writer Italo Calvino. The last built work by Frank Lloyd Wright, who had died earlier that year at 91, was not showered with praise, as one might now expect, but pelted with criticism. Most of its detractors rallied behind one specific indictment: “Everyone claims that the architecture dominates the paintings and it is true,” explained Calvino, who, in his blithe acceptance of the museum as a place to go “primarily to see the architecture,” stood almost entirely alone.

Calvino’s remarks form the opening epigraph of The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconoclastic Masterpiece, a new history of the building by Francesco Dal Co and the second installment of the Great Architects/Great Buildings series published by Yale University Press. In the spirit of the inaugural volume—an essay also by Dal Co on Paris’s Centre Pompidou—the historian sets out again to trace the circumstances that enabled the realization of a building so resistant to the orthodoxy hardening around it. Drawing from correspondence, theoretical discussions, technical analyses, and substantial previous scholarship, he illustrates the charged climate surrounding the genesis of the Guggenheim, condensing decades into a narrative of overlapping events to arrive at new interpretations of Wright’s masterpiece.

Dal Co begins by highlighting a well documented episode. In December 1956, a cohort of 21 artists, including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, published a letter in the