On the occasion of the Guggenheim Museum’s 50th anniversary, the Guggenheim has invited approximately 250 artists, architects, and designers to imagine their dream intervention in Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda. A salon-style installation of two-dimensional renderings of their visionary projects will emphasize the rich and diverse range of inspired proposals will take place from February 12 though April 28, 2010.
Serving more one-million visitors annually at the Guggenheim’s New York facility and more than three-million at worldwide at its other facilities, the Guggenheim Museum already presents organized exhibition of precious cultural artifact for the general public’s enjoyment and delectation. These exhibitions, often organized in a linear structure, present the viewer with a complex offering of audio, visual and textural experiences that impart to the visitor a satisfying sense of culture and history. At the end of these exhibitions, visitors are typically directed to the gift shop where they too can acquire weighty tomes and gewgaws which further reinforce the doctrines developed over the course of the visitor’s experience.
After careful consideration of the Guggenheim Museum spatially and programmatically, Ball Nogues Studio recognized the institution’s unique sequence of inter-connected galleries and ramps as an architectural form well suited for adaptation as an industrial manufacturing assembly line. Seeking to convert the museum’s current cultural production to a more sustainable manufacturing system, Ball Nogues Studio suggests adapting Wright’s masterwork into a contraption for the transformation of raw, organic sugar cane into a delectable candy confection cum art installation and industrial expo that is both easy to eat and delicious. Their proposed re-use is an acknowledgement of the imperative of architects to shape the careful appropriation and preservation of the noted structure while adapting it economically and functionally using new green technologies and systems. That Wright designed the structure, a priori, to suit this pressing, contemporary need is proof enough that form follows function.
Principals in Charge: Benjamin Ball, Gaston Nogues
Project Team: Tim Peeters, Andrew Lyon, Nicole Semenova, Benlloyd Goldstein
Graphic Design Collaboration: Jessica Fleischmann of Still Room
