The Guggenheim Museum opened in New York on October 21, 1959. The building was a spiral, a white drum rising and widening as it climbed, and visitors walked down a continuous ramp past the art. No museum had looked like it before.
Frank Lloyd Wright designed it. He had been given the commission in 1943, and he spent the rest of his life on the project, fighting with the clients and the city over cost, structure, and the sheer strangeness of the design. He called the box an enemy and refused to build one.
The ramp was the whole idea. Visitors rode an elevator to the top and walked down the gentle slope, and the paintings hung on curved walls that some artists hated. Critics argued that the building overpowered the art, and the argument has never fully died.
Wright did not live to see it. He died first. He died in April 1959, six months before the museum opened, and the building was finished by others against a wall of engineering doubt. The spiral that had been called unbuildable stood, and it worked.
The museum became a landmark. It drew crowds for the building alone, and it made New York's museum mile a destination, and the Guggenheim's spiral is now one of the most recognizable shapes in architecture. A man who fought the box all his life left the world the opposite of one.