The Guggenheim in New York has no ordinary floors. It is one long ramp that curls up under a glass dome, and the man who designed it spent 16 years getting it built.
Most museums are boxes with rooms inside. The Guggenheim in New York is not. From Fifth Avenue it looks like a giant white bowl stacked upside down, or a spring that someone has squashed, sitting right across the road from Central Park.
## A museum with no floors
Inside, there are no normal floors. The whole gallery is one long ramp that curls around and around an open middle, all the way up to a huge glass skylight at the top. The idea is that you take the lift to the top and slowly walk down, looking at the art as you go, without ever having to choose which room to visit next.
Standing at the bottom and looking up was the best part for me. You can see the people on every level at once, all going round the same spiral, and the light pours in from the dome right above your head.
## The man who built it
The building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most famous architects in America. The museum was started by Solomon R. Guggenheim, a businessman who collected a new kind of art at the time: abstract paintings made of shapes, lines and colours instead of pictures of people or places. His art adviser, the artist Hilla Rebay, asked Wright to design a building as unusual as the art.
Wright started work in 1943. It took 16 years, and he made hundreds of drawings. People argued about it the whole time. Some artists even complained that the curved walls would make paintings hard to hang. Wright died in April 1959, just six months before the museum opened on 21 October 1959, so he never saw it finished.
## Why a spiral?
Wright believed buildings should feel more like nature than like machines. He liked shapes you find in shells and plants. A spiral also meant one continuous journey, instead of a maze of rooms, and the open middle means you never lose your way.
In 2019 the Guggenheim became part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, together with seven other buildings by Wright. That puts it on the same list as some of the most important places on Earth.
## What I noticed
- The walls lean back slightly, so paintings hang at a gentle angle. - The ramp is so gentle you hardly notice you are walking uphill or downhill. - The building is white inside and out, so the art is what stands out.
I thought a museum would just be where the interesting things are kept. At the Guggenheim, the building is one of the most interesting things of all.