Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its landmark building with the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward. On view now through 23 August 2009, the exhibition showcases sixty-four of Wright’s contemporary design projects.

Some of the exhibited pieces include privately designed residences, civic and government buildings, religious and performance spaces as well as unrealised urban structures. There are also more than 200 of Wright’s original drawings on view to the public for the first time.

In 1943, Hilla Rebay, the director of Solomon R. Guggenheim's Museum of Non-Objective Painting, invited Wright to design the Guggenheim's home as “a temple of spirit, a monument”. Wright moved away from the traditional box-like gallery in his design and the process to create the building went on for sixteen years. Neither Wright nor Guggenheim lived to see it completed. Guggenheim died in 1949 and Wright in 1959, six months before the museum's 21 October inauguration.

During his seventy-two-year career, Wright worked in developing a new type of architecture in which form and function always worked together. Wright also believed that a strong connection with nature was critical to having a spiritual life, and therefore his designs allowed for the seamless integration of interior and exterior. The exhibit hopes to inspire people to implement Wright's ideas on space into their own lives.