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Text by Patrizia Mello, photos by Bruno
Balestrini
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The Solomon R. Guggenheim,
planned by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), broke away from the dicates of
the trends of modern architectural movements and represented the most
poetically linked of all his works. "here is the ideal i propose
for the architecture of the machine age", wrote Wright,
"for how an ideal american architecture should develop in the image
of trees". In this way, entrusting it to an organic image of
construction, Wright intended including the same function of the building
as that in the world of nature, establishing a dialectic rapport between
form and function and not of a casual type as that intended by the main
exposers of the Modern Movement. "it is important to note,"
the historian Bruno Zevi relates, "how Wright's space
reduces the generatrix, placing itself, not in geometrical terms, but in
those immediately plastic."
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"thinking of form as
something which grows and, as it does, space becomes its life giving
force, its construction in a dimension". It is truly this life
giving force which reassesses the rapport with man, entrusting it to an
emotional and aesthetic impact. The Guggenheim Museaum of painting and
modern sculpture in New York, completed in 1959, can be found at number
1071 Fifth Avenue. From an urbanistic point of view it contradicts the
usual chess board type of building, typical of New York, the outside of
which presents strong links to the past with flower boxes at street level
and the possibility of seating, the large curved overhang of the first
floor underlining an invitation to the loggia underneath, the bridge being
a link between the two bodies of the Museum acting as a kind of middle
road between the outside and the inside. The inside space is a continual
upwards movement using a six-floor spiral with galleries which spread out
from the first ramp indicated by a large water fountain in the central
room on the ground floor.
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The diameter of the spiral as it
curves upwards allows for the entrance of light at each level installing
in the visitor a sense of luminosity and tranquility. The overlaps
correspond to the expanding ramps visible from below culminating in a
transparent dome covering the central area. In "the cathedral of
art", observes Zevi, "Wright proposes a stroll
through art, a road similar to a super-garage extending that of the city,
enclosing it in an open spiral to re-converge with the urban context."
Surely this is one of the most original complexes that the history of
Museaum architecture has ever known where the problem of symbiosis with
the works of art has been affronted, the museum being a means of emotional
complicity whilst at the same time liberating the visitor to face the
diverse experiences that art proposes as an intrinsic visualisor of
reality. |
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This spacial articulation was
envisioned as a path from the top of the building which slowly worked its
way down to join the urban space from where it began. The continual spiral
movement implies a more intimately natural adhesion between the creator
and the exposed work of art encountered along the path.
Wright in this way excluded the usual passive design of
an overlapping of each floor in an urban development of building and
managed instead to create an upward spiral movement of each floor.
In this
way no precise distinction exists between the upward and downward slopes
and it is possible to have different perceptions of the surrounding space
at all levels which increases or decreases according to a balance between
an expansion or contraction of the events. At the different levels the
various sectors of the exhibition are divided by separating elements which
receive external light from a continual series of glass window slits, the
main font of illumination, which introduce an interesting co-efficiency of
variability linked to the alternating of day and night. |
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