Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned in 1943 to design a home for Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection of non-objective art, championed by the artist and curator Hilla Rebay. The project took 15 years and more than 700 sketches. The museum opened in October 1959, six months after Wright's death.
Wright made the gallery a single continuous ramp, about 1,400 feet long, that spirals up around an open rotunda beneath a glass skylight. Visitors see the art, and each other, across the open center as they walk.
The design was controversial when it opened, but the critic Paul Goldberger later wrote that almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim. A ten-story annex by Gwathmey Siegel opened in 1992. In 2019 the museum joined the UNESCO World Heritage listing for Wright's 20th-century architecture.
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