In October 1959, when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened the doors to its new building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, it promptly became “the obligatory topic of every New York conversation The last built work by Frank Lloyd Wright, who had died earlier that year at 91, was not showered with praise, as one might now expect, but pelted with criticism. Almost everyone felt that the architecture of the museum dominated the paintings and the art inside. Such was the power of FLW’s architecture. Wright’s building made it socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense, almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim.
What if you get a chance to switch FLW’s masterpiece with your own expression of Guggenheim? What if you get a chance to step into the master’s shoes and be able to design an ‘architectural icon’?
The aim of the competition is to re-create the iconic museum in NYC by the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright at the same exact site but with an entirely new perspective by the participants. The competition offers a chance to re-design the museum created by the master himself, with a similar intent to break from the prevalent conventionality in designing a museum and gallery space and create an innovative and extraordinary built form. The in-situ replacement of the existing museum should be iconic and revolutionary, capable of transforming the urban form of NYC in a similar or a more powerful way. The response should be FLW-like, where he constantly strived to devise new architecture systems that were ahead of his time and were hailed as wonders of the modernist movement.