Architecture
The foundation has long sought, in its constituent museums, to unite its artworks with distinguished architecture. In 1943, Hilla von Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build the foundation's first permanent museum. Rebay wrote to Wright that "each of these great masterpieces should be organized into space, and only you ... would test the possibilities to do so. … I want a temple of spirit, a monument!" The resultant achievement, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, testifies not only to Wright's architectural genius, but also to the adventurous spirit that characterized its founders. The critic Paul Goldberger later wrote that, before Wright's modernist building, "there were only two common models for museum design: Beaux-arts Palace ... and the International Style Pavilion." Goldberger thought the building a catalyst for change, making it "socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim."
Read more about this topic: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Defaced ruins of architecture and statuary, like the wrinkles of decrepitude of a once beautiful woman, only make one regret that one did not see them when they were enchanting.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)