When Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City (1943-59) he defined and activated space simultaneously because the movement of bodies - suggested in his words before sketches existed - configured the space. Activation referred to the user’s experience, which was utilized by Wright since his Taliesin Fellowship (1931) where students learned through embodied knowledge by focusing on their receptive and experiential basis. The main goal of this paper is to evaluate to what extent the extension by Gwathmey Siegel and Associate Architects, in 1992, altered Wright’s original concept for the building.

 

Museums are complex structures whose spatial layouts seem to have a probabilistic effect upon patterns of visitors’ movements, which consequently affect awareness and encounter. In tune with these aspects, we argue that Wright adopted three main premises to design the Guggenheim: Influence how people moved through its layout; consider the configuration of galleries as differentiated social spaces, and assure the organization of spaces and artwork a decisive role in the experience of the visitor.

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We utilized configuration analysis of floor plans and field observations, including recording static activities in the atrium, tracing 12 pedestrian flows, and counting number of visitors in relation to their chosen means of ascending the space. Besides comparing the original 1959 layout with its later addition, this paper brings some of Wright’s ideas for the emblematic building to light, to find out, in agreement with the architect, that the system is highly intelligible due to its key design feature, the atrium. Oppositely, interpersonal interaction and co-presence are weaker away from this space, where concave isovists are recurrent. Despite alterations intended to strengthen its connection with the main gallery, the segregation of the old monitor (lower tower at North) in relation to the main gallery is maintained as thought by Wright.

 

On the other hand, some findings also point towards discrepancies: Contrary to Wright’s idea of ​​visitors floating upwards in the elevator and descending through the ramp (main gallery), we found out that the majority of visitors used the ramp to ascend in space. Consequently a greater interaction with the artwork happened during the ascending movement, as on the way down visitors had little or no interaction with the art, establishing regular contact with the atrium instead. Findings also challenge the emblematic study by Peponis (1993) in regards to the museum’s circulation being impeditive of probabilistic effects in the layout on exploration and encounter, as visitors frequently stopped to take pictures of the space, themselves and their peers, even while located at different ramp levels.

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