Gehry’s N.Y. Design: Huge in Scale, Ambition

New Yorkers tend to like big dreamers. But rarely--if ever--has one sought to shake up that city’s cultural foundations with one blow.

The proposed new Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank O. Gehry, is such a project. To be formally unveiled today by museum director Thomas Krens, the design’s ecstatic forms take the chaotic energy of Manhattan and let it burst free. If it is built, the project will not only significantly alter the downtown skyline, it will transform the city’s cultural landscape.

The new museum’s scale is stunning. With a projected cost of $450 million, the building would house permanent exhibition space for the Guggenheim’s collections from 1945 to the present (the early collection will remain in the famed Frank Lloyd Wright building uptown), an architecture department, technology department, a temporary exhibition hall, a performing arts theater and a museum tower. Raised on 90-foot-tall concrete columns over the East River near the end of Wall Street, the building resembles a gigantic cloud whirling around fragments of the downtown skyline. It would place the Guggenheim alongside the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the city’s most important art institutions.

It is, however, by no means clear that the project will get built in its current form. Although sources say Guggenheim board chairman and insurance magnate Peter Lewis has pledged up to $250 million to the project, Krens has yet to raise the additional $200 million to pay for the building, and beyond that another $400 million for a proposed endowment. Krens will also have to compete for dollars with the more prestigious Museum of Modern Art, which is in the midst of raising $850 million for its major expansion .

Another hurdle is the site itself. Krens first approached Gehry about the project two years ago, after the stunning success of their collaboration at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Within a year, Gehry had completed a preliminary design for Pier 40, on Manhattan’s Lower West Side. But the plan met with stiff opposition from the local community board, and it was scrapped.

Krens then shifted his attention to the Wall Street piers, a key site in the city’s waterfront development plans. According to Janel Patterson, a spokesperson for New York City’s Economic Development Corp., the agency that controls the site, the city has yet to make a decision on the proposal. Sources claim that the museum’s efforts to meet with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who is not known as a friend to the city’s cultural institutions, have so far proved fruitless.

Both Krens and Gehry seem undaunted. “How can you turn a project like this down, even if Krens has a long way to go to make it real?” Gehry said in a recent interview. “It is such a compelling idea, any architect would die to do it.”

An Intersection of Two Worlds: Capitalism and Creative Freedom

The design is conceived as an intersection of two worlds: one of unfettered capitalism, the other of creative freedom. That tension is clearly embodied in the building’s forms. The museum tower--which will house offices, corporate penthouses and possibly a hotel--rises from the center of a plaza that will take the place of three existing piers, climbing 45 stories into the air. The museum--supported on columns as much as 35 feet wide--wraps loosely around the tower. At either end, the block-like forms of the museum’s performing arts theater and an existing but redesigned ferry terminal anchor the composition.

Seen from Brooklyn, the complex will look as if a fragment of the downtown skyline is breaking free of the urban grid to dance over the river. Seen from Wall Street, the composition is more compact, with the museum’s billowing forms framed by the solemn towers pressing in on either side and an elevated section of the FDR Drive cutting across its facade. The drive creates a sort of elevated horizon line, with the museum floating above the more ephemeral landscape of the plaza and river below.

To reach this world, visitors will have to pass under the elevated drive to the main atrium lobby at the center of the plaza, where a series of monumental 200-foot-long escalators will shoot them up to a second lobby at museum level. Partly enclosed in glass, the museum lobby faces the gaping canyon of Wall Street. It is your last glimpse of the world of finance. From here, you begin a procession through the exhibition spaces, which are linked by two more atriums with their own stunning views of the nearby Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty.

By so tenaciously tying the design to its context, Gehry gives his free-flowing forms a genuine urban grit. But the design also becomes a commentary on the relationship between Wall Street and art. It is Big Money, after all, that fuels the art world. Against the intimidating landscape of financial power, Gehry has pitted an even more compelling landscape of the imagination. Picture armies of New York’s culturati and financial barons marching along Wall Street, sucked up into a dazzling machine for cultural debate.

But it is the notion of lifting the museum high up into the air--and turning the plaza over to the public--that makes the design a monument of social optimism. Shaped like an enormous lily pad, with each petal roughly the size of a baseball field, the plaza evokes Henri Matisse’s playful paper cutouts, or Peter Max wallpaper. An ice skating rink will surround the atrium lobby; the rest of the plaza is designed as a vast sculpture garden. Light will spill down through openings carved through the museum and its undulating belly.

Like most of Gehry’s recent works, the Guggenheim plan evokes a utopia of the senses, not of the mind. During the day, the plaza will provide a tranquil refuge from the dense chaos of the city. At night, the museum’s sensuous metal-clad surfaces will be positively dreamlike. Even the sexual imagery is explicit: Slightly tilted, the crystalline shaft of the museum tower pierces through the museum’s forms before dissolving into shards of shimmering glass.

Gehry Would Like to Rethink Relationship of Art and Viewer

Finally, there is the matter of the exhibition spaces, which have yet to be worked out. Gehry claims he would like to rethink the relationship between art and viewer, to create a more fluid connection between the museum’s various departments. And the plaza and atriums offer a clue as to how that could happen, surrounding contemplative galleries with lively public forums where art could be knocked off its pedestal and dragged out into the everyday world.

Such talk may raise eyebrows in New York’s art community, which has already been critical of the asymmetrical galleries Gehry created at the Guggenheim Bilbao, and has generally shown itself to be conservative when it comes to architecture. Curators, in particular, have come to see the sterile white gallery as a neutral frame that embodies modernity. That is a mistake. No architecture is neutral. The Paris salons of the teens and the SoHo conversions of the ‘70s each contributed to how we viewed art in their respective ages. Why shouldn’t both architects and artists take part in the creative dialogue?

Not that the city’s art institutions haven’t flirted with challenging architecture, most recently with Rem Koolhaas’ 1997 proposal for the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, whose technological bravado and references to corporate power were meant to evoke a machine for the promotion of art to the masses. But MOMA rejected that scheme as too controversial, opting instead for a sleeker design by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi that fit safely within the Modernist canon. The Whitney Museum’s banal 1998 addition to their landmark Marcel Breuer building was even more timid, as if the museum did not want to disturb the Modernist ghosts who so stubbornly fought to overturn the tired conventions of their own time.

In pressing forward with this design, the Guggenheim has proved willing to test the limits of the city’s imagination. If the plan fails, New York will not only lose a unique architectural landmark, it will miss an opportunity to shore up the creative spirit that has, until now, made it a center of world culture.