Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The museum's design was contested before it even opened. In December 1956, while construction was still underway, twenty-one painters, including Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, published an open letter to the museum's director and trustees arguing that Wright's tilted, curving walls and skylit ramp would work against the paintings the building existed to show, making canvases hard to hang and see correctly. The dispute did not end there: when Thomas Messer became director in 1961, staff still had to build specially angled plinths to compensate for the curved walls, and one Alexander Calder mobile could never be made to hang level in the space. Wright himself held that the design gave painting a more unified, sympathetic setting than a conventional box gallery, and over time curators found the ramp's continuous flow suited large, immersive exhibitions the traditional format could not, so the very features the painters objected to are now often cited as the building's defining strength.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is the New York museum Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the collector Solomon R. Guggenheim to house his foundation's collection of non-objective and modern painting. Wright was hired in June 1943 and spent the next fifteen years revising the design through more than 700 sketches and six full sets of working drawings before construction finally began in August 1956; the building opened in October 1959, six months after Wright's own death, and the interior spiral ramp he designed remains the museum's defining architectural feature, a continuous helical gallery lit from a domed skylight rather than a sequence of conventional rooms. It was Wright's last major work and is now among the most visited museums in the world.