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Text File | 1993-04-04 | 6.0 KB | 141 lines

                                                                                DESIGN, Page 64

Finally Doing Right by Wright

After years of fuss and furor, the great but inhospitable
Guggenheim gets a splendid overhaul

By KURT ANDERSEN


    Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan is not
even 33 years old, but it seems a relic of some distant age,
when vast, impractical artistic hubris could persuade and
triumph. Wright was a fabulous caricature of the genius
artiste, difficult and grand, and so the Guggenheim was a
caricature of 20th century genius architecture -- bizarre,
ahistorical, antiurban. These days, there are still plenty of
arrogant, solipsistic architects around, but self-confidence --
and talent -- on the scale of Wright's no longer exists.

    And so, in this reduced age, people are discombobulated by
the prospect of fussing with a masterwork such as the
Guggenheim. It is, after all, the greatest American architect's
best-known building. And yet the Guggenheim's very singularity
has always made it a wretched place to show pictures: the
narrow ramp that hugs the inside wall has been the museum's
main exhibition space.

    When the trustees decided a decade ago that they could not
manage without considerable additional space, they turned to
Charles Gwathmey and Robert Siegel, architects whose work
(sleek, handsome, rather restrained) is not exactly Wrightian.
On the 35-ft. sliver of land behind Wright's museum, Gwathmey
Siegel would build the Guggenheim an addition. Ever since, the
firm has been accused by a slightly hysterical mandarin
consensus of desecrating the Guggenheim, of wanting to make a
toothpick from a piece of the True Cross; the first design, a
huge tower that brazenly cantilevered a pale green box out over
Wright, was rejected.

    In the public fracas surrounding the expansion, it was
always the exterior of Gwathmey's new $24 million slab that got
all the attention; the $22 million interior renovation of
Wright's building (which cost $7 million in 1959) was mentioned
only passingly. Now that the work is finished and the doors are
open, that fever ratio should reverse itself: the slab is a
bland and only slightly annoying intrusion, while Gwathmey's
intelligent, intricate, loving work inside is a revelation,
making it a far, far better museum than it has ever been.

    The uncomfortable truth is that the Guggenheim has been
problematic not just for curators but for visitors: the
interior could be oppressive and maddeningly hermetic. Now, for
the first time, the museum has complexity as well as sheer
monomaniacal power. You can still keep to Wright's relentless
ramp, but now you can also break away at four different levels
into the new building and wander the loft like galleries freely.
Gwathmey has opened up the place, clearing away clutter and
creating dozens of new architectural moments -- glimpses of
Central Park, comfortably arm's-length views of the great ramp
itself, details of the Wright building freshly revealed.
Gwathmey unabashedly believes that he has unveiled a new and
improved Guggenheim. "It's no longer," he says, "a one-liner."

    Yet even that one-liner -- the spiraling ramp, soaring
atrium and glass dome -- has been reinvigorated, allowed to
have its punch line. For years the top section of the ramp was
partitioned off and turned into a large closet. Now visitors
can go all the way to the grand summit, and curators have been
given back the best, roomiest gallery space in Wright's
building.

    The surprising, redemptive virtue of this project, however,
is not the purification of the great hall but the transformation
of Wright's four-story wing that abuts the famous upside-down
ziggurat. What was a cramped, homely office warren, a thicket
of Plexiglas and stained wood, has become a jewel box open to
the public: three floors of balconied galleries and, on the
ground floor, an expanded museum shop. With its open core and
rotunda, it is like a fetching little gemutlich miniature of the
vertiginous main hall.

    Nor can anyone object to the interiors of Gwathmey's new
slab. Architectural honesty and etiquette are observed (he has
gone out of his way to show the seams between Wright and
Gwathmey), and the Guggenheim can finally display large
canvases: Francis Bacon's enormous triptych Three Studies for a
Crucifixion, for instance, hangs comfortably in the new
17-ft.-high fifth-floor gallery.

    It is the visual impact of the new tower, outside on Fifth
Avenue, that provokes so much ambivalence. In an ideal world,
there would be no new tower: it tames Wright, too neatly and
decorously walling off his astounding object from the
neighborhood behind it. Gwathmey says he has provided a proper
frame for Wright, but the Guggenheim is supposed to clash with
the city, to twist and shout. Yet for all that, the tower is
hardly a monstrosity, or even very big, at 27,000 sq. ft. among
the smallest 10-story buildings ever erected.

    While critics are still carping even about the tower,
Gwathmey seems to think that it is excessively discreet. "This
building," he says, just a touch contemptuously, "is very . .
. responsible." Uncontrite, he firmly believes that his
original hulking box would have been better. "It would have been
more dynamic."

    In the end, neither Gwathmey nor preservationist ideologues
got precisely what they wanted. And what about the absent third
party to the debate? For Frank Lloyd Wright, displaying art was
more a pretext than a program; instead of a museum, he designed
a mammoth abstract sculpture, a space where the paintings would
always be subordinate, the Kandinskys and Miros little remoras
stuck to the skin of his great whale. Finally, that perversity
has been indulged: most of the art has been moved to adjacent
structures, and his Guggenheim is free to be itself. Wright, the
magnificent bastard, has won.







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