Audio Guide of the Imperfections of a Perfect Masterpiece

A closer look at the quirks, imperfections, and clever design solutions that have helped Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum evolve over the decades.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Roman Mars?

  This episode is sponsored by Acura. Acura has always done things its own way, breaking rules and building what no one else dared, all while focusing on what truly matters: performance. They've dedicated over 40 years of passion and devotion to it. Through thoughtful craftsmanship and the confidence to pursue a different approach, Acura chases every idea to bring you sleek designs, visionary technology, and precision-crafted performance. They believe that the best experiences are made through the little details. Learn more at acura.com.

• 0:40Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 2019, I worked on a very exciting project with the Guggenheim Museum in New York: an audio tour about the history and design of a truly great work of American architecture.

• 0:57Roman Mars?

  Even if you've never been to the Guggenheim, you probably recognize it. From the outside, the building is a light gray spiral, and inside, the art is displayed on one long ramp that curves up towards a glass skylight in the ceiling. There is no museum like it, and it was made by one of my favorite architects, Frank Lloyd Wright. What you're going to hear now is the whole audio tour. If you're in New York City, you should try and listen to it inside the museum. There are signs on every floor indicating where you should stop. But if you can't make it to New York, the tour is still really fun and works on its own. The team at the Guggenheim were generous enough to allow me to create a different kind of audio tour that feels like walking through the building with an extremely enthusiastic

• 1:39Roman Mars?

  and knowledgeable friend rather than a formal architecture professor. I hope you like it. We're going to post an episode guide with photos on our website at 99pi.org so you can follow along at home. But I think you can close your eyes and imagine and still enjoy all the stories. Here's the first stop. If you're in the building, start playing this in the lobby of the rotunda.

• 2:06Roman Mars?

  Welcome to the Guggenheim Museum. I'm Roman Mars, the creator and host of the design and architecture podcast 99% Invisible. The Guggenheim Museum is an architectural masterpiece made by a master of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright. In 2019, UNESCO selected eight buildings designed by Wright, including the Guggenheim, to be a World Heritage Site. UNESCO sites are considered vital to the collective interests of humanity. Yellowstone is a heritage site. So is the Grand Canyon. Of the World Heritage properties in America, 12 were made by God. Eight were made by Frank Lloyd Wright. When co-founder and first director of the Guggenheim Museum, Hilary Bay commissioned

• 2:51Roman Mars?

  this building, she said she wanted a Temple of Spirit, and Wright designed one for her. Here's the director of the Guggenheim, Richard Armstrong.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  I feel now when I look up into that dome, I'm actually looking at a very beautiful abstraction of a rose window in a cathedral.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  I'm in awe.

• 3:15Roman Mars?

  So we're going to take the genius of this building as a given. It's great. What I'm going to focus on are the oddities, the accretions, the interventions that reveal a different kind of genius. Not just the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright and his bold, original vision, but the genius of all the people that made this building function, adapt, and grow over the decades.

• 3:39Roman Mars?

  Frank Lloyd Wright was the originator of a concept called "organic architecture." And you might look around and see how this entire building resembles a seashell, and you might think, "Oh, cool. Well, that must be organic architecture." But sorry, that's actually not what he meant.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Really, for Frank Lloyd Wright, organic architecture was more about the metaphor of a living organism.

• 4:03Roman Mars?

  This is Ashley Mendelson, the Guggenheim's assistant curator of architecture and digital initiatives.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  And actually, when he was on the site, he referred to the steel as the tendons and the muscles of the building, the concrete as the fatty tissue, and the waterproof paint as the skin.

• 4:21Roman Mars?

  So we're going to explore, touch, and even dance with this living organism of a building and witness the evolution that's occurred within these curved walls.

• 4:33Roman Mars?

  The next stop is by the second-floor elevators on the main ramp.

• 4:41Roman Mars?

  Frank Lloyd Wright's plan was for the Guggenheim to be a top-down museum. Originally, visitors were supposed to ride the elevator to the top of the spiral ramp and walk down. That's where the exhibitions all started.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  I've seen many images of old installation views from the '60s into the '70s where that's where the intro text was. Initially, the exhibitions were planned from top down, starting on ramp five. Get out of the elevator. The entrance, name of the exhibition was right in front of you, and you walked down to see it.

• 5:21Roman Mars?

  But over time, curators started programming from the bottom up. It just felt natural. Also, the Guggenheim does a lot of retrospectives focusing on one artist, from their early work to the late stuff.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Many artists, over the course of their careers, their work got larger in scale. And so if you're doing a retrospective where you're starting with the early work, which is small, and then moving to larger work, it makes sense to start at the bottom because the display spaces in the building get bigger and bigger as you move up in space.

• 5:54Roman Mars?

  But if you want to be a Frank Lloyd Wright originalist and you really need to walk down from the top of the Guggenheim, you might have company as you ride up the elevator.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  I think still 15% to 20% of people take the elevator up. And it's probably because they heard that that's how Frank Lloyd Wright intended, and they want to see it that way. And so most designers and curators plan for it to be experienced both ways. And in fact, most visitors that I talk to walk up and then walk down. So it makes sense that the show should be able to read in both ways.

• 6:30Roman Mars?

  This isn't the only big difference from how Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned the Guggenheim. His blueprints included plans for a second spiral ramp that would protrude out into the center of the rotunda. It was going to be twice as steep as the corkscrew ramp you are standing on right now. He called it "the quick ramp," and it was supposed to make it faster to get between floors.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  And Frank Lloyd Wright, in the description, said, "Feel the pull of gravity as you walk down the grand ramp, and for quick and easy access between ramps, take the quick ramp," which is really good.

• 7:02Roman Mars?

  But on the quick ramp, you'd feel gravity's pull a little too much. The design was way too steep. It was more like a quick slide, so it never got built. But the quick ramp still influenced the final design of the museum. You'll notice the hole in the center of the rotunda, it's not a perfect circle, and the ramp you're on right now is not a perfect spiral. There's a semicircle that juts out into the rotunda. That's called "the bump out."

• 7:27Speaker 02

  The bump out used to be part of the quick ramp. When you see that, then you understand that every curve actually belongs to a circle somewhere. They all had a reason for being there.

• 7:40Roman Mars?

  Sadly, we missed out on the opportunity to slide our way down the Guggenheim. But the stairs we got as an alternative route between floors are still pretty delightful. You can find them in the hallways behind the elevator doors. They twist up the building in a triangle and add another lovely, pure form to the museum. The next stop is by the third-floor elevators on the main ramp.

• 8:07Roman Mars?

  As you walk up the ramp in the rotunda, place your hand on the parapet. That's the low wall separating the ramp from the void in the center. The first thing you notice is that it's very low. If it were built today, let's be honest, it would probably be a couple inches taller. The other thing you'll notice is that even though the building is composed of these pure forms like circles and spirals, the top of the parapet isn't perfectly rounded or finished off with a crisp, right angle. It's bumpy and uneven.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  So the reason why the parapet is kind of lumpy in that way is because we touch up paint truly every day when the museum's not open, and that's because the building's white, and so it gets dirty. You'd have to really close the whole building and have it closed for, you know, I don't know, a full week or something if you were to truly repaint the interior. And so instead, we touch up here and there, and for that reason, everything kind of has a texture.

• 9:02Roman Mars?

  You have an effect on this building. By being here and touching this railing, you've changed it. Its changing texture is part of its evolution as an organic structure.

• 9:21Roman Mars?

  Okay, stay right here. This is the second stop on the third floor.

• 9:26Roman Mars?

  Constructing Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of a spiral museum was not an easy feat to pull off. Wright oversaw the work, but a local architect named William Short was in charge of the project on the ground, and George Cohen was the general contractor. In the three years it took to build the Guggenheim, they came to the realization that some of Wright's ideas were not going to be doable. Like the idea of making the building a self-supporting spiral.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  If you imagine a slinky or something in the way that the wire, just because it's in tension in that way, is holding itself together, that's what he said early on.

• 10:06Roman Mars?

  So instead of a self-supporting spiral, they used something called web walls. Look at the floor across from you. Those thin walls that you see that jut out from floor to ceiling, those are actually all connected. Those are the web walls. They hold this whole building together.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  These vertical walls, which extend all the way up into the oculus. The combination of all of those together is the structural skeleton of the building. Everything else hangs off of it. The ramp hangs off of it, the exterior walls hang off of it.

• 10:39Roman Mars?

  They had to solve the problem of making a curving spiral building no one had even imagined before, much less built. And they did it with gunite. Gunite is concrete that is shot out of a hose at high velocity. You spray it against a mold, it dries real fast, and takes on the shape of the mold. It was Wright's idea to use this pretty novel technology when the building was constructed. If you look closely, and the sun is just right, you can see an angled checkerboard pattern of lines that betray the form of the plywood molds that created the shape of the outer wall.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  They had hired a subcontractor to do the gunite, and because they didn't think about the formwork being expressed, the gunite formwork is placed on like a real angle, which is not consistent. And it's just because they didn't think you would see it, and so they just made their pattern work as you do.

• 11:31Roman Mars?

  The pattern is a result of the gunite construction, and Frank Lloyd Wright didn't like the fact that it was visible. But George Cohen convinced him it actually exemplified the principles of architectural honesty that Frank Lloyd Wright and other modernists championed. In many ways, George Cohen is the undersung hero of the Guggenheim, but Frank Lloyd Wright's respect for him is clear. Right by the front entrance, George Cohen's name is written in metal, embedded on the exterior wall, alongside a red square that serves as Frank Lloyd Wright's signature. This was the only time Wright ever put the general contractor's name on a building.

• 12:17Roman Mars?

  For the next stop, head over to the café off the ramp on the third floor.

• 12:24Roman Mars?

  Look out the window, and you'll see the outer facade up close. There are two cool things to know about the facade of the Guggenheim. First is the color. It's very different from when the building opened. It wasn't this whitish gray, it was more of a beigey yellow. Frank Lloyd Wright called the original color buff.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  There are really great photos of that. It kind of almost looks more like a sandcastle, it has a very different feeling than it does now.

• 12:51Roman Mars?

  To create buff, they used a special waterproof paint called Cocoon. Eight years after the building opened, the exterior needed to be repainted, so the museum staff went to the manufacturer of Cocoon paint and discovered they no longer had buff.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  So that original color buff was no longer on the market the first time they repainted the building, so they ended up going with a slightly lighter shade. And over the years, they used a bunch of different colors, more of a stark white, and currently it's gray. People perceive that to be white, but it's actually gray.

• 13:24Roman Mars?

  After the building was awarded landmark status, the Guggenheim went through a restoration, and it created an interesting conundrum paint-wise. Should the museum stick with the light gray everyone had grown accustomed to, or roll back time and repaint the Guggenheim the original yellow buff color? In the end, they chose light gray. It's the color everyone associates with the museum today. The second thing to know about the facade is that it's not structural. The concrete just hangs off the framework of the building and doesn't hold anything up. It's super thin, in places the concrete is less than five inches thick. There are notes in the archives warning workers not to use nails that are too long when hanging the artwork.

• 14:08Roman Mars?

  The nails could go right through to the outside.

• 14:17Roman Mars?

  Okay, stay right here. This is the second café stop.

• 14:23Roman Mars?

  So right now, you're in the café, but you're also standing on the third floor of a second smaller rotunda. Oh no, it doesn't look like it, right? Originally, Frank Lloyd Wright wanted all of the Guggenheim staff to work in this building. He called this space "the monitor," although nobody's entirely sure why.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  I really couldn't find a good description, but Frank Lloyd Wright always referred to it as the monitor in all correspondences, like he really dubbed it that. My guess is that because it was the administrative building, it's kind of monitoring everyone else.

• 14:57Roman Mars?

  People used to have desks and lamps and family photos, and they sat right where you're standing. But it was a pretty cramped space and awkwardly shaped.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  This overall almond/football shape that you see is a stairwell. That shape kind of repeats throughout the building, and all of this is original. It's always been here, so if you're trying to imagine this being an office space, everything had to work around these forms.

• 15:24Roman Mars?

  The offices were kind of like railroad apartments. There was no hallway, so if you had a desk at the back window, you had to walk through everyone else's office just to go to lunch. Today, the museum staff mostly work off-site, in a downtown location. And the monitor has become public gallery space and home to the Guggenheim café and gift shop.

• 15:48Roman Mars?

  Now, you see that low wall in the corner, the one that looks like a balcony? Well, walk over there and take a look down. You'll see a gallery. That gallery is actually part of a 10-story tower that's connected to the museum. You probably didn't notice the tower behind the main building when you came in. Nobody does, and that's kind of the point. It was built in 1992 by the architecture firm Guatme Segal, and it replaced an older tower built by Frank Lloyd Wright's son-in-law. The problem with the old tower was that it was just a bit much. Ashley pulled out a photo of it, and just listen to her try to describe it.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  So this tower is kind of two intersecting boxes. One tall vertical box, which is the elevator core, and then this rectangular box, which is cantilevered, so it's hanging off of that thing, and both of them have these vertical stripes, hexagonal windows. Just a pattern of hexagons all over the facade. It's wild, too, because I feel like it's completely fallen out of everyone's memory.

• 16:55Roman Mars?

  Seriously, look it up on your phone or when you get home. It was wild. It looks a bit like 70s sci-fi architecture. I kind of love it, but it actually stole attention away from the museum.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  And the Guatme Segal Tower does such a good job of just looking like it was always meant to be there and allowing the original Frank Lloyd Wright building to really shine. It just acts as a backdrop, and so I think that's why that design is so great.

• 17:27Roman Mars?

  We'll be right back.

• 17:31Roman Mars?

  Let's take a break to thank the sponsor of today's episode, Acura. Just as museum designers carefully consider every detail of the visitor experience, Acura engineers and designers obsess over the details that shape every drive. Precision crafted performance is curated with intention, precision, and craftsmanship to shape meaningful experiences. Thoughtfully designing the experience around how people actually use their vehicles, designing for an intuitive, engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience. With Acura, form follows function. Contours to enhance efficiency, headlights to reduce fatigue at night, and strategically placed speakers to create a rich and enveloping audio atmosphere.

• 18:16Roman Mars?

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• 18:41Roman Mars?

  The next stop is by the fourth-floor elevators on the main ramp.

• 18:50Roman Mars?

  Take a look at the ramp you're standing on. If you hang a picture with a slanted floor like this one, how would you do it? Would you make it straight? Or would you try to hang it to match the angle of the floor? Frank Lloyd Wright designed a third option. He made bays throughout the building which slope backwards where you can hang paintings.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Wright really thought about a bay as a comprehensive display system. So the back wall is at an angle approximately 105 degrees, which is really similar to an easel.

• 19:24Roman Mars?

  The problem with the easel plan is that it's hard to look at paintings when they're tilting away from you. That's not how artists and curators wanted it. Look out into the rotunda.

• 19:37Roman Mars?

  If the exhibition on display right now has paintings, you'll notice that many of them appear to be floating in space. That's the Guggenheim's signature way of hanging paintings.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  You can't see the hanging mechanism. It's hiding behind the painting. If we were able to get a real, on a real angle and look back, you would be able to see where that hanging mechanism is. And all of it is behind there. And so that's why you get that really nice shadow there. And the shadow doesn't have any of the hanging mechanism. It's just the piece itself.

• 20:09Roman Mars?

  I'm not going to sugarcoat this. The installation team has a very hard job here. They have to figure out a new plan for each work of art and for each part of the building, because the bays get larger as you go up. Now, here's another thing about the rotunda. If you look up, you'll see works of art. If you look across, you'll see works of art there too. Down, there's more art. You're surrounded by art.

• 20:34Roman Mars?

  Nancy Spector is the artistic director and Jennifer and David Stockman chief curator at the Guggenheim.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  For some people, it can be a religious experience. It's so profound to stand there with that work of art or works of art. Then, on top of that, you have the ability to look across the rotunda and see where you're going and where you've come from. So you have a chance to revisit from a distance.

• 20:59Roman Mars?

  The Guggenheim is the only museum in town without a backstage area where staff can prepare new exhibits. And that means if you come during a changeover period between exhibitions, you get to see the new exhibit taking shape right before your eyes. Nancy says installing art in the Guggenheim is a totally unique challenge. But it's a challenge she loves.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  My education has been in a round building with very strange leaning walls and inclined ramps. So it is my normal. I've always spoken about the building as a catalyst and that it challenges us over and over and over again.

• 21:38Roman Mars?

  And one of those challenges is that Nancy has to literally walk laps around the building to see if the placement of each work of art is just right.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  When you're installing, you're constantly walking around the circle. It changes at every vantage point, so one has to kind of understand that.

• 21:55Roman Mars?

  The progression of the continuous ramp encourages viewers to look at each piece of art in a particular order. The order of the art tells a story.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  In terms of the structure of the museum, it really invites sequential looking in a way that a square or rectangular room doesn't. I really do like building a story, making an argument in space that, for me, having worked here for so long, it's easier to do on the ramps, which, again, unfold sequentially versus a room that basically tells you the story immediately.

• 22:34Roman Mars?

  But you, as a visitor to the Guggenheim, also have control over the story. You can choose to take in the art across the rotunda or the bay right in front of you. You can follow along with the story being told or choose your own adventure and see what you discover.

• 22:58Roman Mars?

  The next stop is by the fifth-floor elevators on the main ramp.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  My name's Christopher George. I'm the director of the fabrication department.

• 23:07Speaker 05

  Richard Avery, senior facilities manager.

• 23:10Roman Mars?

  Christopher and Richard are part of the team that installs new exhibitions in this building. They've hung full-sized cars and oversized cat skeletons to fill the center void. In this unusual space, each exhibition is a feat of engineering that has to be planned perfectly. But there's only so much planning that can happen.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  Obviously, there's no Guggenheim rotunda that we can go to, you know, and practice. We make the best with the spaces available. And then hopefully, everything comes together well when it's time for the actual installation.

• 23:45Roman Mars?

  Once you solve the problem of hanging a chandelier made of nine cars, you do not want to have to start from scratch the next time an artist wants to display something audacious in the rotunda. So some of the anchor points are still left in place. Look up. There are concrete support walls, they're called web walls, that hold up the whole building and converge in the skyline. If you look very carefully, you'll notice stainless steel circles all over them. Those are rigging points, places where cables and pulleys have been attached over the years. Each point has a name.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  So we've actually named them according to the artists that they were initially installed for. So we have rigging points that we call the Flavin points for when there was the Flavin light tower installed. We have them for Frank Gehry, the Gehry points from when we installed sets of hanging aluminum.

• 24:40Roman Mars?

  Throughout the museum, there are lots of bolts and hooks that unveil how old exhibitions were displayed. These are the leftovers of something amazing that happened here. It's not just on the ceilings and walls. The floors have them too. As you walk on the ramps, look down to the terrazzo floor.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  You'll see a lot of dark circular depressions in the floor.

• 25:03Roman Mars?

  Installing level sculptures on a slanted floor requires a lot of forethought and power tools.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  Say for installing pedestals or platforms or stanchions or even some pieces of art, they need to be affixed to the floor.

• 25:19Roman Mars?

  But here's the thing with a sloped floor. If a sculpture needs to be moved for any reason, you can't just pick up the pedestal and shift it a couple inches. The angle might be wrong. So you have to recut the whole pedestal and do it over again, affixing it to the floor at another point. That's why the anchor points on the floor aren't as reusable from exhibition to exhibition. There's no point in leaving them there, so the Guggenheim fixes them. But fully repairing the terrazzo isn't easy. There are only a few companies that know how to fix this kind of flooring, including one guy who has worked with the Guggenheim. His name is Larry. Larry's good, but unfortunately, Larry is now retired.

• 25:57Speaker 05

  We're having him actually train some of the museum staff so that we'll still have the skill set in hand to continue with these repairs ourselves.

• 26:06Roman Mars?

  These divots and pockmarks are ghosts, tiny reminders of past exhibitions.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  Some you've done yourself and you kind of remember putting those holes in the floor. But one day, they'll all be gone and they'll just be memories.

• 26:29Roman Mars?

  The final stop is by the sixth-floor elevators on the main ramp.

• 26:37Roman Mars?

  When you reach the final revolution at the top of the spiral ramp, look down at the terrazzo floor. You'll notice that the pattern changes. Most of the floor on the ramp has a repeating circular pattern, but at this point, the pattern turns to square.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  And so that initially showed the boundary between public and private space.

• 27:01Roman Mars?

  In the early days of the Guggenheim, you could not go past this line. There's some debate as to what Frank Lloyd Wright wanted, but as best we can tell, this part was not supposed to be gallery space.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  This was never exhibition space, which is hard for you to imagine. It's so beautiful up here. Everyone loves these spaces.

• 27:20Roman Mars?

  In the early days, this space was used for storage. But here it is now, open to the public. And you have a lovely opportunity to transgress and trespass into what was once forbidden territory. Do it with me. Take one step over into the squares. According to the original plans, you were not supposed to be here. Now, step back. The ghost of Frank Lloyd Wright is at peace. Okay, step over again into the forbidden zone. Look at you, you urban explorer. It feels good, doesn't it? Now, step back and keep going, back and forth, and dance with the Guggenheim.

• 28:01Roman Mars?

  If there is any piece of architecture worth dancing about, this is it.

• 28:23Roman Mars?

  This tour of the Guggenheim Museum, which I called "An Audio Guide to the Imperfections of Frank Lloyd Wright's Perfect Masterpiece", was produced by me, Roman Mars, with Chris Berube and Sophia Klatzker. Mixed by Sharif Youssef. Additional tech production by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Rial. Special thanks to everyone at the Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to make this, many of whom have moved on since we recorded and released this episode, especially Caitlin Dover and Laura Kleeger, who cooked up this whole idea, and Ashley Mendelson for being our guide, for this guide.

• 29:06Roman Mars?

  Thank you again to the sponsor of today's episode, Acura. From pencil sketches of beauty and precision to cars built by masters of their craft, elegant design language is refined to support dynamic performance. Acura thoughtfully curates a new experience through careful design, expertly engineered around how people actually use their vehicles. It's what defines precision-crafted performance. Because the most impactful choices are often the ones you won't consciously notice, but deeply feel. Learn more at acura.com.