Published on the occasion of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's fiftieth anniversary, and in association with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, this fascinating, beautifully designed volume is the first to fully explore the process behind one of the greatest, most iconic Modern buildings in America-and the world. The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum examines the history, design and construction of Wright's masterwork with preliminary drawings, models and photographs, as well as three major essays that consider the building in three important contexts. Hillary Ballon discusses the obstacles Wright faced in getting the Guggenheim built, and how his complex relationship with New York City was reflected in his design; Neil Levine explores why Wright's Guggenheim had much greater impact on museum architecture than museums designed by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; and Joseph Siry writes about the museum's novel construction and how it impacted the work of a later generation of architects including Frank Gehry, Louis Kahn and I.M. Pei. Through archival materials, letters and a richly illustrated timeline, the book also traces the relationship between the architect and his clients during the 16-year construction process.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
By Robin Benson
Format:Hardcover
This should have looked so good. The cover has an intriguing and distinctive design on a predominantly upright shaped book and maybe this would be ideal to reveal the wonders of this remarkable building but unfortunately I thought the title had serious editorial flaws:
* You would think a book about a building and especially this building would have a decent floor plan but there is none. William Storrer's definitive The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion has computer generated plans of every Wright building. The spread in his book on the Guggenheim has a plan for the lower, ground and first levels. Someone should have asked permission to reproduce these.
*There are many letters from individuals and organizations reproduced in the book. The editors obviously thought they had some significance but twenty-five of them are reproduced just too small to read. I get the impression that the designers just used them as graphic fillers to liven up the pages.
* Although there is no overall floor plan of the Museum there are many plans of part of the building and colored sketches showing design ideas but like the letters these have been reproduced too small so they are useless.
*The book's designers have created a page grid and followed it by squeezing in photos, drawings, newspaper clippings and other graphic material without any regard to what the reader might want to see. This creates excessive amounts of white space throughout the pages and was particularly noticeable in the seventy-seven page Timeline section at the back of the book. Probably more than a third of each page is just white paper. So many photos and graphics really should have been much larger but aren't because then they wouldn't follow the page grid.
*The curse of tiny type lives on in this book. (Why is this so prevalent in 'designed' books?) Captions and page numbers are in six point and printed in a darkish orange. Footnotes are also in six point but printed in black. Considering how wide the margins are on each page these footnotes could easily have been accommodated on the relevant pages. Fortunately the book's main text is a quite readable nine point.
* There is no index. How is that possible? The absence suggests, to me at least, that the whole production has been created in a very slapdash way.
As to the text, well, I'm happy to say this does deliver something for your money. The seven main chapters cover FLW and his masterpiece in detail and I thought the first two: Hilary Ballon who looked at the origins of the Museum in New York and Joseph Siry who covered the construction in relation to other later museums, particularly interesting. The extensive Timeline section in the back pages was quite fascinating as you read about the many problems Wright had with the authorities and individuals. It turns out the Guggenheim was his most challenging commission. The book's last essay, by Angela Starita, covers the recent updating of the building in 2005 to 2008 and she provides a wealth of detail about the physical structure and the corrections made to the original.
As I said in the beginning this could have been a wonderful book but it falls far short of my expectations essentially because of the inadequate work from Pentagram, who designed it, and the editors who didn't pick up these fundamental errors.
***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under below the cover.
* You would think a book about a building and especially this building would have a decent floor plan but there is none. William Storrer's definitive The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion has computer generated plans of every Wright building. The spread in his book on the Guggenheim has a plan for the lower, ground and first levels. Someone should have asked permission to reproduce these.
*There are many letters from individuals and organizations reproduced in the book. The editors obviously thought they had some significance but twenty-five of them are reproduced just too small to read. I get the impression that the designers just used them as graphic fillers to liven up the pages.
* Although there is no overall floor plan of the Museum there are many plans of part of the building and colored sketches showing design ideas but like the letters these have been reproduced too small so they are useless.
*The book's designers have created a page grid and followed it by squeezing in photos, drawings, newspaper clippings and other graphic material without any regard to what the reader might want to see. This creates excessive amounts of white space throughout the pages and was particularly noticeable in the seventy-seven page Timeline section at the back of the book. Probably more than a third of each page is just white paper. So many photos and graphics really should have been much larger but aren't because then they wouldn't follow the page grid.
*The curse of tiny type lives on in this book. (Why is this so prevalent in 'designed' books?) Captions and page numbers are in six point and printed in a darkish orange. Footnotes are also in six point but printed in black. Considering how wide the margins are on each page these footnotes could easily have been accommodated on the relevant pages. Fortunately the book's main text is a quite readable nine point.
* There is no index. How is that possible? The absence suggests, to me at least, that the whole production has been created in a very slapdash way.
As to the text, well, I'm happy to say this does deliver something for your money. The seven main chapters cover FLW and his masterpiece in detail and I thought the first two: Hilary Ballon who looked at the origins of the Museum in New York and Joseph Siry who covered the construction in relation to other later museums, particularly interesting. The extensive Timeline section in the back pages was quite fascinating as you read about the many problems Wright had with the authorities and individuals. It turns out the Guggenheim was his most challenging commission. The book's last essay, by Angela Starita, covers the recent updating of the building in 2005 to 2008 and she provides a wealth of detail about the physical structure and the corrections made to the original.
As I said in the beginning this could have been a wonderful book but it falls far short of my expectations essentially because of the inadequate work from Pentagram, who designed it, and the editors who didn't pick up these fundamental errors.
***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under below the cover.
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