Preface

Dal Co, Francesco

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Preface

Francesco Dal Co

The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconoclastic Masterpiece

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the subject of this book, shows how even a contemporary building can be an example of “timeless architecture” (my chosen translation of architettura di sempre, a concept inspired by Max Weber that I have often explored in my writings). I use this term to distinguish a work that does not “throw...

Author

Francesco Dal Co

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21456

Preface

In the last few weeks the obligatory topic of every New York conversation is the new museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to house Solomon Guggenheim’s art collection. It has just been opened. Everyone criticizes it; I am a fanatical supporter of it, but I find myself nearly always on my own in this. The building is a kind of spiral tower, a continuous ascending ramp without steps, with a glass cupola. As you go up and look out you always have a different view with perfect proportions, since there is a semi-circular outcrop that offsets the spiral, and down below there is a small slice of elliptical flower-bed and a window with a tiny glimpse of a garden, and these elements, changing at whatever height you are now at, are an example of architecture in movement of unique precision and imagination. Everyone claims that the architecture dominates the paintings and it is true (apparently Wright hated painters), but what does it matter? You go there primarily to see the architecture, and then you see the paintings always well and uniformly illuminated, which is the main thing.

—Italo Calvino, 1959

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the subject of this book, shows how even a contemporary building can be an example of “timeless architecture” (my chosen translation of architettura di sempre, a concept inspired by Max Weber that I have often explored in my writings). I use this term to distinguish a work that does not “throw itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved,” as the poet Heinrich Heine wrote. Buildings of this kind—and their meanings—do not belong to an epoch, a specific culture, or a geographical area; no “ism” applies to them, and they possess a language that is able to communicate universally. They are works that are not bound by the same constraints, however necessary, that historians face in studying them: construction, purpose, client objectives, financial limitations, available materials, the technical knowledge of the builders, or the project’s ambition—in short, everything that makes studying the intrinsically unstable architecture of the past “sweet poison,” as Richard Krautheimer said.

Our own era, like every period of time, is subject to a continuous movement; it is transformed and in turn recasts the certainties from which it grew into enigmas, and facts into new question marks. This does not change with a narrower historical perspective or shorter time frame. On the contrary, a tighter focus often yields greater complexities, and the most difficult task for the historian is to trace them. The threads of the warp stretched on the loom, together with the weft that crisscrosses them, form the cloth that the historian must examine in order to interpret its nature, meaning, and identity. This task becomes more complicated still when the warp is not taut, and picking out the threads of the weft involves unraveling the knots that bind the strings in a tangle. The story that I recount here is not a neat skein. These threads ply across different planes and directions, with different lengths, layers, and knots that result not from the mechanical bustle of the loom’s shuttle, but rather from the unpredictable movement of life.

Like mercury poured on a marble surface, the “story” of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum breaks up into many disparate plots. Telling it was thus an exercise in patience, involving a continual shuttling between events, episodes, and circumstances that arose and resurfaced and that never truly concluded. In trying to impose an order on these events, without any confidence in their chronology, I have emphasized the important role that the passing of time played in the construction of the Guggenheim Museum. The seventeen years that separate the moment that Wright was commissioned to design the work and the day the museum was inaugurated reveal the innumerable difficulties that had to be overcome to build this unique work, which was itself conceived by men in the twilight of their lives. The many years it took are echoed in the many ways that time’s influence can be seen in the building’s extraordinary composition, which we still admire today. In other words, Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” who turns his back on the future and fixes his gaze on the past, has no role in this history. Instead, time acted as Wright’s constant companion throughout the creating of the Guggenheim; its “power to build” shaped the process itself. This is unusual, as time and its consequences generally set in after a work is completed, when its original meaning has long departed.

This unsought alliance between Wright and time, the “great builder,” could not have been formed if the architect had not first provided—or rather, offered—his know-how, obstinacy, imagination, and cynicism. These qualities are shared in the makeup, and the inherent interrelationship, of the ideas driving the building’s structure and static conception—contingent and effective proof of Wright’s continuing exercise in “discretion,” as a “quest of freedom in deciding.” The most surprising point in the Guggenheim story is how discretion, in this sense, forms the base of the construction’s materiality—that is, the ways in which the museum was conceived in engineering terms and then physically built. I considered these processes, among many less tenable, as among the most resilient threads in this metaphorical warp.

In addition to the role of time and the building’s structure, the third major theme in this narrative concerns the very idea of a museum, a concept that was at the heart of Wright’s project. Visiting the Guggenheim, going over its story, and reading Wright’s words recalled the many times that contemporary culture has reacted against the “historical fetishism” that has led museums, which Hans Sedlmayr termed “pompous asylums for the homeless,” to take the place in the modern city that cathedrals once held. “Today, if I go to the Louvre,” wrote Alberto Giacometti, “. . . all those works have had such a miserable air—quite a miserable trajectory, so precarious, a stammering approximation over the course of centuries, in all possible directions yet extremely concise, primary, naïve, in order to delimit a formidable immensity, that I looked despairingly at the living.” Giorgio Manganelli observed that in museums “each item is prey—bought, captured, deported, unearthed, excavated, stolen, corrupted, mistaken, smuggled. A museum presupposes a passion that is not oblivious to crimes, somber concentration, the mythological fantasy of being able to carve out a flat and bounded space, Ptolemaic in Copernicus’ spherical world.” While writing about the Guggenheim I had before my eyes similar images, and it is for this reason that I spoke of it as an iconoclastic museum, and not only because “you go there primarily to see the architecture,” as Italo Calvino remarked in 1959. Rather, I tried to emphasize the heretical originality of a work representing the zenith of the career of a great architect whose guiding light was his aversion to the “authority of orthodoxy.”

It is from this perspective, too, that I believe it appropriate to consider the Guggenheim as a metonym for Wright himself. But metonymy is not exhausted by a single meaning. Rather, as Yves Bonnefoy has written and I have attempted to express in these pages, it “plunges into the depths of the past, reopens the mind to the thought of chance, and thus to the irreversible passage of time, to the intuition of finiteness.”

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