Audio Guide of the Imperfections of a Perfect Masterpiece

Touring the Guggenheim

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0:40This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 2019, I worked on a very exciting project with the Guggenheim Museum in New York, an audio tour about the history and design of a truly great work of American architecture. Even if you've never been to the Guggenheim, you probably recognize it. From the outside, the building is a light gray spiral, and inside, the art is displayed on one long ramp that curves up towards a glass skylight in the ceiling.

1:10There's no museum like it, and it was made by one of my favorite architects, Frank Lloyd Wright. What you're going to hear now is the whole audio tour. If you're in New York City, you should try and listen to it inside the museum. There are signs on every floor indicating where you should stop. But if you can't make it to New York, the tour is still really fun and works on its own. The team at the Guggenheim were generous enough to allow me to create a different kind of audio tour that feels like walking through the building with an extremely enthusiastic and knowledgeable friend, rather than a formal architecture professor.

1:44I hope you like it. We're going to post an episode guide with photos on our website at 99pi.org so you can follow along at home. But I think you can close your eyes and imagine and still enjoy all the stories. Here's the first stop. If you're in the building, start playing this in the lobby of the rotunda. Welcome to the Guggenheim Museum. I'm Roman Mars, the creator and host of the Design and Architecture podcast, 99% Invisible.

2:14The Guggenheim Museum is an architectural masterpiece made by a master of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright. In 2019, UNESCO selected eight buildings designed by Wright, including the Guggenheim, to be a World Heritage Site. But UNESCO sites are considered vital to the collective interests of humanity. Yellowstone is a heritage site. So is the Grand Canyon. Of the World Heritage properties in America, 12 were made by God. Eight were made by Frank Lloyd Wright.

2:46When co-founder and first director of the Guggenheim Museum, Hilla Rebe, commissioned this building, she said she wanted a temple of spirit. And Wright designed one for her. Here's the director of the Guggenheim, Richard Armstrong. I feel now when I look up into that dome, I'm actually looking at a very beautiful abstraction of a rose window in a cathedral. I'm in awe.

3:14So we're going to take the genius of this building as a given. It's great. What I'm going to focus on are the oddities, the accretions, the interventions that reveal a different kind of genius. Not just the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright and his bold original vision, but the genius of all the people that made this building function, adapt, and grow over the decades. Frank Lloyd Wright was the originator of a concept called organic architecture. And you might look around and see how this entire building resembles a seashell and you might think, oh cool, well that must be organic architecture.

3:50But sorry, that's actually not what he meant. Really for Frank Lloyd Wright, organic architecture was more about the metaphor of a living organism. This is Ashley Mendelsohn, the Guggenheim's assistant curator of architecture and digital initiatives. Actually, when he was on the site, he referred to the steel as the tendons and the muscles of the building, the concrete as the fatty tissue, and the waterproof paint as the skin.

4:21So we're going to explore, touch, and even dance with this living organism of a building and witness the evolution that's occurred within these curved walls.

Walking down the ramps

4:32The next stop is by the second floor elevators on the main ramp.

4:41Frank Lloyd Wright's plan was for the Guggenheim to be a top-down museum. Originally, visitors were supposed to ride the elevator to the top of the spiral ramp and walk down. That's where the exhibitions all started. I've seen many images of old installation views from the 60s into the 70s where that's where the intro text was. Initially, the exhibitions were planned from top-down, starting on ramp 5.

5:11Get out of the elevator. The entrance name of the exhibition was right in front of you, and you walked down to see it. But over time, curators started programming from the bottom up. It just felt natural. Also, the Guggenheim does a lot of retrospectives, focusing on one artist, from their early work to the late stuff. Many artists, over the course of their careers, their work got larger in scale. And so if you're doing a retrospective where you're starting with the early work, which is small, and then moving to larger work,

5:45it makes sense to start at the bottom because the display spaces in the building get bigger and bigger as you move up in space. But if you want to be a Frank Lloyd Wright originalist, and you really need to walk down from the top of the Guggenheim, you might have company as you ride up the elevator. I think still 15 to 20 percent of people take the elevator up. And it's probably because they heard that that's how Frank Lloyd Wright intended, and they want to see it that way. And so most designers and curators plan for it to be experienced both ways.

6:17And in fact, most visitors that I talk to walk up and then walk down. So it makes sense that the show should be able to read in both ways.

6:30This isn't the only big difference from how Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned the Guggenheim. His blueprints included plans for a second spiral ramp that would protrude out into the center of the rotunda. It was going to be twice as steep as the corkscrew ramp you are standing on right now. He called it the quick ramp, and it was supposed to make it faster to get between floors. And Frank Lloyd Wright in the description said, Feel the pull of gravity as you walk down the grand ramp, and for quick and easy access between ramps, take the quick ramp, which is really good.

7:02But on the quick ramp, you'd feel gravity's pull a little too much. The design was way too steep. It was more like a quick slide. So it never got built. But the quick ramp still influenced the final design of the museum. You'll notice the hole in the center of the rotunda, it's not a perfect circle. And the ramp you're on right now is not a perfect spiral. There's a semicircle that juts out into the rotunda. That's called the bump out. The bump out used to be part of the quick ramp. When you see that, then you understand that every curve actually belongs to a circle somewhere.

7:36They all had a reason for being there. Sadly, we missed out on the opportunity to slide our way down the Guggenheim. But the stairs we got as an alternative route between floors are still pretty delightful. You can find them in the hallways behind the elevator doors. They twist up the building in a triangle and add another lovely, pure form to the museum.

Building the spiral structure

7:59The next stop is by the third floor elevators on the main ramp.

8:06As you walk up the ramp in the rotunda, place your hand on the parapet. That's the low wall separating the ramp from the void in the center. The first thing you'll notice is that it's very low. If it were built today, let's be honest, it would probably be a couple inches taller. The other thing you'll notice is that even though the building is composed of these pure forms like circles and spirals, the top of the parapet isn't perfectly rounded or finished off with a crisp right angle. It's bumpy and uneven. So the reason why the parapet is kind of lumpy in that way is because we touch up paint truly every day

8:42when the museum's not open, and that's because the building's white, and so it gets dirty. You'd have to really close the whole building and have it closed for, you know, I don't know, a full week or something if you were to truly repaint the interior, and so instead, we touch up here and there, and for that reason, everything kind of has a texture. You have an effect on this building. By being here and touching this railing, you've changed it. Its changing texture is part of its evolution as an organic structure.

9:17Okay, stay right here. This is the second stop on the third floor.

9:27Constructing Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of a spiral museum was not an easy feat to pull off. Wright oversaw the work, but a local architect named William Short was in charge of the project on the ground, and George Cohen was the general contractor. In the three years it took to build the Guggenheim, they came to the realization that some of Wright's ideas were not going to be doable, like the idea of making the building a self-supporting spiral. If you imagine a slinky or something in the way that the wire, just because it's in tension in that way,

10:01is holding itself together, that's what he said early on. So instead of a self-supporting spiral, they use something called web walls. Look at the floor across from you. Those thin walls that you see that jut out from floor to ceiling, those are actually all connected. Those are the web walls. They hold this whole building together. These vertical walls, which extend all the way up into the oculus, the combination of all of those together is the structural skeleton of the building.

10:31Everything else hangs off of it. The ramp hangs off of it. The exterior walls hang off of it.

10:38They had to solve the problem of making a curving, spiral building no one had even imagined before, much less built. And they did it with gunite. Gunite is concrete that is shot out of a hose at high velocity. You spray it against a mold. It dries real fast and takes on the shape of the mold. It was Wright's idea to use this pretty novel technology when the building was constructed. If you look closely, and the sun is just right, you can see an angled checkerboard pattern of lines that betray the form of the plywood molds that created the shape of the outer wall.

11:14They had hired a subcontractor to do the gunite. And because they didn't think about the formwork being expressed, the gunite formwork is placed on like a real angle, which is not consistent. It's just because they didn't think you would see it. And so they just made their pattern work as you do. The pattern is a result of the gunite construction, and Frank Lloyd Wright didn't like the fact that it was visible. But George Cohen convinced him and actually exemplified the principles of architectural honesty that Frank Lloyd Wright and other modernists championed.

11:46In many ways, George Cohen is the undersung hero of the Guggenheim. But Frank Lloyd Wright's respect for him is clear. Right by the front entrance, George Cohen's name is written in metal, embedded on the exterior wall. Alongside a red square that serves as Frank Lloyd Wright's signature. This was the only time Wright ever put the general contractor's name on a building.

Facade colors and offices

12:17For the next stop, head over to the cafe off the ramp on the third floor.

12:24Look out the window, and you'll see the outer facade up close. There are two cool things to know about the facade of the Guggenheim. First is the color. It's very different from when the building opened. It wasn't this whitish gray. It was more of a beigey yellow. Frank Lloyd Wright called the original color buff. There are really great photos of that. It kind of almost looks more like a sandcastle. It has a very different feeling than it does now. To create buff, they used a special waterproof paint called cocoon.

12:54Eight years after the building opened, the exterior needed to be repainted. So the museum staff went to the manufacturer of cocoon paint and discovered they no longer had buff. So that original color buff was no longer on the market the first time they repainted the building. So they ended up going with a slightly lighter shade. And over the years, they used a bunch of different colors, more of a stark white. And currently, it's gray. People perceive that to be white, but it's actually gray. After the building was awarded landmark status, the Guggenheim went through a restoration.

13:29And it created an interesting conundrum, paint-wise. Should the museum stick with the light gray everyone had grown accustomed to? Or roll back time and repaint the Guggenheim the original yellow buff color? In the end, they chose light gray. It's the color everyone associates with the museum today. The second thing to know about the facade is that it's not structural. The concrete just hangs off the framework of the building and doesn't hold anything up. It's super thin. In places, the concrete is less than five inches thick.

14:02There are notes in the archives warning workers not to use nails that are too long when hanging the artwork. The nails could go right through to the outside. Okay, stay right here. This is the second cafe stop.

14:23So right now, you're in the cafe. But you're also standing on the third floor of a second, smaller rotunda. I know, it doesn't look like it, right? Originally, Frank Lloyd Wright wanted all of the Guggenheim staff to work in this building. He called this space the monitor, although nobody's entirely sure why. I really couldn't find a good description, but Frank Lloyd Wright always referred to it as the monitor in all correspondences. Like, he really dubbed it that. My guess is that because it was the administrative building, it's kind of monitoring everyone else.

14:57People used to have desks and lamps and family photos, and they sat right where you're standing. But it was a pretty cramped space and awkwardly shaped. This overall almond-slash-football shape that you see is a stairwell. That shape kind of repeats throughout the building. And all of this is original. It's always been here. So if you're trying to imagine this being an office space, everything had to work around these forms. The offices were kind of like railroad apartments. There was no hallway.

15:28So if you had a desk at the back window, you had to walk through everyone else's office just to go to lunch. Today, the museum staff mostly work off-site, in a downtown location. And the monitor has become public gallery space, and home to the Guggenheim Café and Gift Shop.

15:48Now, you see that low wall in the corner, the one that looks like a balcony? Well, walk over there and take a look down. You'll see a gallery. That gallery is actually part of a 10-story tower that's connected to the museum. You probably didn't notice the tower behind the main building when you came in. Nobody does. And that's kind of the point. It was built in 1992 by the architecture firm Guathme Siegel. And it replaced an older tower built by Frank Lloyd Wright's son-in-law. The problem with the old tower was that it was just a bit much.

16:22Ashley pulled out a photo of it and just listened to her try to describe it. So this tower is kind of two intersecting boxes. One tall vertical box, which is the elevator core. And then this rectangular box, which is cantilevered, so it's hanging off of that thing. And both of them have these vertical stripes, hexagonal windows, just a pattern of hexagons all over the façade. It's wild, too, because I feel like it's completely fallen out of everyone's memory.

16:55Seriously, look it up on your phone or when you get home. It was wild. It looks a bit like 70s sci-fi architecture. I kind of love it, but it actually stole attention away from the museum. And the Guathme Siegel Tower does such a good job of just looking like it was always meant to be there and allowing the original Frank Lloyd Wright building to really shine. It just acts as a backdrop. And so I think that's why that design is so great.

17:27We'll be right back.

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Hanging art on sloped walls

18:41The next stop is by the fourth floor elevators on the main ramp. Take a look at the ramp you're standing on. If you hang a picture with a slanted floor like this one, how would you do it? Would you make it straight? Or would you try to hang it to match the angle of the floor? Frank Lloyd Wright designed a third option. He made bays throughout the building which slope backwards where you can hang paintings. Wright really thought about a bay as a comprehensive display system.

19:15So the back wall is at an angle approximately 105 degrees, which is really similar to an easel. The problem with the easel plan is that it's hard to look at paintings when they're tilting away from you. That's not how artists and curators wanted it. Look out into the rotunda. If the exhibition on display right now has paintings, you'll notice that many of them appear to be floating in space. That's the Guggenheim's signature way of hanging paintings.

19:48You can't see the hanging mechanism. It's hiding behind the painting. If we were able to get on a real angle and look back, you would be able to see where that hanging mechanism is. And all of it is behind there. And so that's why you get that really nice shadow there. And the shadow doesn't have any of the hanging mechanism. It's just the piece itself. I'm not going to sugarcoat this. The installation team has a very hard job here. They have to figure out a new plan for each work of art and for each part of the building.

20:18Because the bays get larger as you go up. Now here's another thing about the rotunda. If you look up, you'll see works of art. If you look across, you'll see works of art there too. Down, there's more art. You're surrounded by art.

20:34Nancy Spector is the artistic director and Jennifer and David Stockman chief curator at the Guggenheim. For some people, it can be a religious experience. It's so profound to stand there with that work of art or works of art. Then on top of that, you have the ability to look across the rotunda and see where you're going and where you've come from. So you have a chance to revisit from a distance. The Guggenheim is the only museum in town without a backstage area where staff can prepare new exhibits.

21:05And that means if you come during a changeover period between exhibitions, you get to see the new exhibit taking shape right before your eyes. Nancy says installing art in the Guggenheim is a totally unique challenge. But it's a challenge she loves. My education has been in a round building with very strange leaning walls and inclined ramps. So it is my normal. I've always spoken about the building as a catalyst and that it challenges us over and over and over again.

21:37And one of those challenges is that Nancy has to literally walk laps around the building to see if the placement of each work of art is just right. When you're installing, you're constantly walking around the circle. It changes at every vantage point. So one has to kind of understand that. The progression of the continuous ramp encourages viewers to look at each piece of art in a particular order. The order of the art tells the story. In terms of the structure of the museum, it really invites sequential looking in a way that a square or rectangular room doesn't.

22:14I really do like building a story, making an argument in space that, for me, having worked here for so long, it's easier to do on the ramps, which, again, unfold sequentially versus a room that basically tells you the story immediately. But you, as a visitor to the Guggenheim, also have control over the story. You can choose to take in the art across the rotunda or the bay right in front of you. You can follow along with the story being told or choose your own adventure and see what you discover.

22:58The next stop is by the fifth floor elevators on the main ramp. My name is Christopher George. I'm the director of the fabrication department. Richard Avery, senior facilities manager. Christopher and Richard are part of the team that installs new exhibitions in this building. They've hung full-sized cars and oversized cat skeletons to fill the center void. In this unusual space, each exhibition is a feat of engineering that has to be planned perfectly.

23:28But there's only so much planning that can happen. Obviously, there's no Guggenheim rotunda that we can go to, you know, and practice. We make the best with the spaces available, and then hopefully everything comes together well when it's time for the actual installation. Once you solve the problem of hanging a chandelier made of nine cars, you do not want to have to start from scratch the next time an artist wants to display something audacious in the rotunda. So some of the anchor points are still left in place.

24:00Look up. There are concrete support walls, they're called web walls, that hold up the whole building and converge in the skylight. If you look very carefully, you'll notice stainless steel circles all over them. Those are rigging points, places where cables and pulleys have been attached over the years. Each point has a name. So we've actually named them according to the artists that they were initially installed for. So we have rigging points that we call the Flavin points for when there was the Flavin light tower installed.

24:32We have them for Frank Gehry, the Gehry points from when we installed sets of hanging aluminum. Throughout the museum, there are lots of bolts and hooks that unveil how old exhibitions were displayed. These are the leftovers of something amazing that happened here. It's not just on the ceilings and walls. The floors have them too. As you walk on the ramps, look down to the terrazzo floor. You'll see a lot of dark circular depressions in the floor.

25:03Installing level sculptures on a slanted floor requires a lot of forethought and power tools. Say for installing pedestals or platforms or stanchions or even some pieces of art, they need to be affixed to the floor. But here's the thing with a sloped floor. If a sculpture needs to be moved for any reason, you can't just pick up the pedestal and shift it a couple inches. The angle might be wrong. So you have to recut the whole pedestal and do it over again, affixing it to the floor at another point.

25:34That's why the anchor points on the floor aren't as reusable from exhibition to exhibition. There's no point in leaving them there. So the Guggenheim fixes them. But fully repairing the terrazzo isn't easy. There are only a few companies that know how to fix this kind of flooring, including one guy who has worked with the Guggenheim. His name is Larry. Larry's good. But unfortunately, Larry is now retired. We're having him actually train some of the museum staff so that we'll still have the skill set in hand to continue with these repairs ourselves.

26:06These divots and pockmarks are ghosts, tiny reminders of past exhibitions. Some you've done yourself and you kind of remember putting those holes in the floor. But one day they'll all be gone and they'll just be memories.

Reaching the top floor

26:28The final stop is by the sixth floor elevators on the main ramp.

26:36When you reach the final revolution at the top of the spiral ramp, look down at the terrazzo floor. You'll notice that the pattern changes. Most of the floor on the ramp has a repeating circular pattern. But at this point, the pattern turns to square. And so that initially showed the boundary between public and private space.

27:01In the early days of the Guggenheim, you could not go past this line. There's some debate as to what Frank Lloyd Wright wanted. But as best we can tell, this part was not supposed to be gallery space. This was never exhibition space, which hard for you to imagine. It's so beautiful up here. Everyone loves these spaces. In the early days, this space was used for storage. But here it is now, open to the public. And you have a lovely opportunity to transgress and trespass into what was once forbidden territory.

27:33Do it with me. Take one step over into the squares. According to the original plans, you were not supposed to be here. Now step back. The ghost of Frank Lloyd Wright is at peace. Okay, step over again into the forbidden zone. Look at you, you urban explorer. Feels good, doesn't it? Now step back. And keep going. Back and forth. And dance with the Guggenheim. If there is any piece of architecture worth dancing about, this is it.

28:06This tour of the Guggenheim Museum, which I called An Audio Guide to the Imperfections of Frank Lloyd Wright's Perfect Masterpiece, was produced by me, Roman Mars, with Chris Brubay and Sophia Klotzker.

28:36Mixed by Sharif Youssef. Additional tech production by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Rial. Special thanks to everyone at the Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to make this, many of whom have moved on since we recorded and released this episode, especially Caitlin Dover and Laura Klieger, who cooked up this whole idea, and Ashley Mendelsohn for being our guide for this guide. Thank you again to the sponsor of today's episode, Acura.

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