Frank Lloyd Wright began designing New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1943. Solomon R. Guggenheim and his adviser Hilla Rebay initially planned a museum for Guggenheim’s collection of nonobjective art, but the architectural project evolved over many years.
Wright’s design departed sharply from conventional museum layouts. Instead of a stack of rectangular galleries, he proposed a continuous spiral ramp surrounding a central open rotunda. The design process involved many revisions, partly because of disagreements over the museum’s location, scale, and construction costs.
The museum was not completed until 1959, six years after Wright’s death. It therefore became one of his final major architectural works, although William Wesley Peters and other members of Wright’s office helped carry the project through construction.
The 1943 date refers to the beginning of Wright’s design work, not the museum’s opening. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, an earlier institution connected with the collection, had opened in 1939 in a rented Manhattan building.