How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit

To continue, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is often referred to as The Guggenheim. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is located in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum stands out in its surroundings. A passage in the book How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit describes the way the museum looks to pedestrians “The first view for most pedestrians walking up Fifth Avenue is a tantalizing glimpse of a fragment of what appears to be a giant cream colored-colored Dixie cup. What on earth is it? As you get closer the shape turns out to be a dramatic upside-down bowl that looms over the sidewalk. By then you are under the overhanging base and about to enter the building.” (Rybczynski 81). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is

As a plastic material eventually becoming stone-like in character there lives in it great atheistic property, as yet inadequately expressed.” (Rybczynski 137). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum demonstrates how Frank Lloyd Wright is a master of the abstract resources of modern form. Quoting the book How Architecture Works “As an object itself, the Guggenheim Museum interior is like the exterior, a remarkable example of abstract sculpture, wrote Lewis Mumford in a New Yorker review ” (Rybczynski 139). The balustrade of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is slightly tilted. The concrete walls contain a rounded top. A description of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s structure “The balustrade, for example, stiffens the spiraling ramp; the twelve ribs from which the ramp cantilevers looks like walls and at the top turn into supports for the glass dome that covers the atrium. The curved ramp has a bulging bay on each floor --- does it help it to support the ramp? Impossible to tell.” (Rybczynski 139). The details of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum are played down and seamlessly