The Two Franks and Their Architecture

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Different architects have different styles because they are trying to get at different things. Architecture is not just about making something beautiful anymore, it is about trying to get across a set of ideas about how we inhabit space. Two of the most famous architects of the twentieth century, one from each side, the early part and the later part up until today each designed a museum with money donated by the Guggenheim foundation. One of these is in New York City, it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The other is in bilbao, Spain, and it was designed by Frank Geary. My purpose of this paper is to interrogate each of these buildings, glorious for different reasons, to show how each architect was expressing their own style.

The Guggenheim Museum in NewYork City directly across from the famous Central Park. This is important because Frank Llyod Wright is known for his organic architecture, where he tries to make the building fit in with the landscape. This is not the case with the Guggenheim, which I have seen and I can tell you it looks nothing like nature. It is a big white, almost circular building and many critics at the time said that it looked like a 'gigantic toilet.' The important thing about Wright's Guggenheim, however, is not what it looks like from the outside, but what does the purpose of the building. As a museum, the building would have to house a lot of many various art works. The Guggenheim in New York specifically holds Modern Art. My guess is that Wright wanted to do something modern, but he also wanted it to be functional.

In museums, you usually have to follow a map and go into different rooms to see the art works. The Guggenheim's inside is one gigantic spiral so that people can walk ...

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...e did a thing more like Wright. He made the building fit in with its surroundings.

As stated, nothing about Wright's Guggenheim looks like nature, or even like its surroundings. Across from Central Park, but on a side of the street that has tall old buildings. In the middle of these skyscrapers facing the park squats Frank's short fat little toilet looking museum. Like a sore thumb. If anything, this seems to me to be much more like Geary's Santa Monica house. Not just because it has a high level of "ugliness" but mainly because it has to be emphasizing its own fact of having been built by human hands because it is such a distraction. Not only is it an eyesore (at least from the outside), I think that a statement about how a building is something constructed (like Geary's Santa Monica house does) is really the kind of thing that only needs to be said once.

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