The Guggenheim New York: Where You're Part of the Show

I almost didn’t pay to go up the spiral in the Guggenheim Museum’s big Rotunda, thinking that the experience couldn’t possibly be worth the entry price, because I had already taken my pictures, I didn’t want to see the art, and I could see the ramp from the (free) lobby. But I watched the people above watching me below; this was new. I had not seen pictures of people in the space. It is always presented as this empty formal composition; a dead sculpture. Above me it was like Whack-a-Mole: where was the next head going to appear? People were drawn to the view, compelled to look across and down just as I was compelled to look up.

Bringing my attention back to the ground floor, I saw that the bench that curves out from the wall was packed with people jealously guarding their spots. I realized that the ledge above their heads acted as shelter, protecting these people from the seven-story height and allowed them to be both a part of the experience and separate from it. Looking down, the polished concrete floor had thin metal rings, circles, laid in it of the same metal as the understated “Guggenheim Museum” title cast at the base of a curving, cantilevered wall outside. I wondered at the permanence of these two decisions, especially the rings because they create an infinite, unchanging pattern, a tattoo.

Once I was up a couple of levels and could see across, up, and down into the entire building I started to understand the space’s appeal. I was part of an interactive, shared experience; we were walking up the spiral looking at art, standing at the balcony’s edge feeling exhilarated, looking and being looked at because we were part of the unofficial and ongoing museum-goers exhibit. And because you cannot watch someone without yourself being watched, the result is a communal experience instead of an exploitative one.

The way the room’s intimacy is achieved is so subtle that most visitors probably never think to question it. The small diameter at the base of the spiral that gradually opens up to the sky; the shelter provided by the floor of the spiral above for the walkway of the spiral below; the size of the circles in the floor— the diameter proved to be slightly smaller than standing in the middle of one with my arms out to either side; a key-hole shaped doorway low enough that I could touch the top of it without effort (I am 5’4”); the repetition of the circle size, using it as a module both for the bubble skylights and for half-columns.

It is the use of the half-columns that most impressed me. Within the main space are two giant support columns that stand from the ground floor to the roof—one houses the elevator, but I don’t know about the other. To keep these structures from overwhelming the main space, Wright added half-columns the same diameter as the floor circles to the side that receives the most human contact and attention, that facing into the spiral. This simple gesture gives the human body something to respond to and, when you’re looking at it from across the room, a vertical line that your eye will follow from floor to ceiling. He even makes one of the half-columns emerge through the spiral at the lower floors so that it becomes a half-column inside the entry ramp.

Exhibit space is created between rib-walls, which are long in a direction perpendicular to the ramp and the exterior wall. Here, the floor steeply slopes up to meet the exterior wall beneath what were meant to be a skylights, but for archival reasons are fluorescent lights above glass. The rib-walls meet the exterior wall below the “skylights,” leaving an opening so light spills into adjacent exhibit spaces.

Sitting on one of the wooden circular stools Wright designed, I watched a little red-haired girl rush past, breathlessly asking her dad if they could visit again soon and listing the activities she wanted to do on that trip. Her harried dad, trying to keep up with her, replied bewildered, “Sure, but we aren’t finished with this visit, yet.” It might be the modern art that she was so excited about, but somehow I don’t think Rothko appeals to a five-year-old as much as Wright does.

From my stool, the building’s structure was completely clear. The rib-walls grew taller, getting shorter in their long direction, not sticking so far into the ramp, and curving towards one another and in towards the center in pairs, until they formed parabolic arches to support the glass dome. Horizontal concrete bands connected these pairs to keep them stable, completing the frame from which the spiral ramp cantilevered. It was as simple and elegant as that, and yet instead of a static composition it was alive with people and afternoon sunlight, a living sculpture if ever there was one.