What I find most fascinating about a place like the Guggenheim Museum is that it stands as a supreme example of how virtually anything can be defended, praised, or condemned intelligently with words. Conflicting arguments abound about works of architecture, art, film, music, dance, etc. I once asked an architect after seeing a particularly hideous structure what she would make of a building which every lay person hated but was lauded by architecture critics. The answer she gave: “Then architecture is a failure.”

I have cited examples in this blog of things which have become iconic in spite of their being considered an abomination by many at the time of completion, such as the Eiffel Tower. The Guggenheim is one of those places – time has softened those aspects that perhaps have offended many.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1959, is considered one of the city’s major architectural landmarks. It is located on in Manhattan’s Upper East Side at 89th Street and Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. Second photo here. It houses Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art. The collection was seeded by Solomon Guggenheim, an art collector whose foundation funded the establishment of the museum.

The building, which looks like a stacked white ribbon, was extremely controversial at the time of its completion. Inside, the main gallery is a helical spiral, rising from the ground level to the top, crowned with a skylit rotunda. Here are some of the conflicting reviews as reported in Time Magazine in 1959:

“A war between architecture and painting, in which both come out badly maimed,” declared Art Critic John Canaday on Page One of the New York Times; “The most beautiful building in America,” retorted Critic Emily Genauer in the New York Herald Tribune. “A building that should be put in a museum to show how mad the 20th Century is,” editorialized the New York Daily Mirror. “Mr. Wright’s greatest building, New York’s greatest building.” said Architect Philip Johnson, “one of the greatest rooms of the 20th century.” “Frank has really done it,” snapped one artist. “He has made painting absolutely unimportant.”

The criticisms revolve around several aspects of the building. One is that the museum design is a distraction from the art itself. The sloping ramp provides no level base for a viewer’s reference. The small exhibition rooms off the main spiral are small and windowless – the walls are angled and make hanging paintings difficult. Prior to its opening, twenty-one artists, including Willem de Kooning, signed a letter protesting the display of their work in the museum. Wright replied that the old rectilinear frame of reference was “a coffin for the spirit” and admonished them to wait and see. Paintings were to be tilted backward, “as on the artist’s easel.” Wright had proposed “one great space on a continuous floor.” “An atmosphere of the unbroken wave—no meeting of the eye with angular or abrupt changes of form.”

When the building opened, Robert Moses said that it looked like “an inverted oatmeal dish.” Wright retorted, “It’s going to make the Metropolitan Museum look like a Protestant barn.” Others referred to it as a “snail,” “an indigestible hot cross bun,” and “a washing machine.”
Snails, barns, coffins, oatmeal dishes, washing machines, ribbons, unbroken waves – The Guggenheim.

Imagine being 13 and not having seen much of the world at all.
Imagine also living at a time when technology was on the cusp of the truly fantastic – with mainframe computers, transistors and integrated circuits, the Moog synthesizer designed by Robert Moog, and the A-11 aircraft, capable of sustained flight of 2000 mph being announced. And the biggest technological achievement of our time, as promised by JFK during his 1960 presidential campaign, was soon to come: we were going to the moon, literally.

1964 was also the year of the British Invasion, with the arrival of the Beatles in the USA. In the world of civil rights, Malcolm X announced his break with the Nation of Islam, the formation of a black nationalist organization, and met Martin Luther King, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, abolishing racial segregation in the United States. The Vietnam War was heating up and we saw the first demonstrations. Feminism and the sexual revolution were in full swing, and the Vatican condemned the birth control pill.

So it was in this time that my family took our first trip to New York City to visit the 1964 World’s Fair. I remember only a little from that trip, but what I do remember was something that was truly fantastic, a spectacle larger and grander than I ever imagined possible. The exhibits were amazing and way ahead of their time. The audio-animatronics used by Disney are still in use today – Disney’s It’s a Small World was unveiled at the Pepsi pavilion. IBM displayed handwriting recognition. General Electric sponsored Progressland, where the audience was seated and revolved around an auditorium with numerous audio-animatronic presentations of the progress of electricity in the home. The General Motors Futurama had visitors moving on seats through an exhibition of the world of the future. The entire fairground was as large as a small city. Fountains were everywhere – it was true pageantry.

The most memorable icon for this fair was the Unisphere, which is still standing in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the site of the fair (and the previous 1939-40 fair). The theme was Peace Through Understanding, and the Unisphere represented global interdependence. Built to celebrate the beginning of the space age, it was dedicated to “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe.”
The Unisphere was built in type 305L stainless steel by the US Steel Corporation and erected on the same structural foundation that supported the 1939/1940 New York World’s Fair’s Perisphere. At 12 stories (140 feet), it remains the world’s largest globe and has become one of the few permanent remaining structures from the fair and an unofficial symbol for Queens.

I am sorry that those of you unable to attend will have to imagine and that I have the privilege of remembering …

Note about the fair: The 1964 World’s Fair was actually mired in controversy. In order to be profitable, the fair organizers, headed by Robert Moses, decided that the fair would need to run for two 6 month seasons (1964 & 1965). However, the rules of the BIE (Bureau of International Expositions), headquartered in Paris, stated that an international world’s fair run for one six-month period only and only one exposition per 10-year period in a host country. The USA did not meet these requirements, and a visit by Moses to Paris was not successful. Moses made his disdain for the organization’s decision public. The BIE retaliated by requesting member nation’s not participate. Hence, the roster of participants was primarily smaller nations and a large number of industrial firms.