Why visit
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened on Fifth Avenue in 1959, six months after architect Frank Lloyd Wright died. Its widening white spiral challenged the conventional sequence of rectangular galleries, placing a continuous ramp around a central rotunda beneath a broad glass skylight.
What to see
The museum grew from Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection and Hilla Rebay's advocacy for non-objective art. Its holdings now extend across modern and contemporary movements, including major bodies of work from the Thannhauser Collection and the Panza Collection, while temporary exhibitions repeatedly reinterpret the sloping exhibition route.
Plan your visit
From the rotunda floor, visitors see several levels and other people at once; from the ramp, artworks share space with views across the void. An adjoining tower adds conventional galleries, but Wright's original building remains the defining object and forms part of UNESCO's group of twentieth-century works by the architect.
