Guggenheim Museum, NYC

Guggenheim Spiral
Originally uploaded by wmliu

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which opened in 1959, is one of the best-known museums in New York City and one of the 20th century's most important architectural landmarks, says Wikipedia.

Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the museum––which is often called simply The Guggenheim––is home to a renowned permanent collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art, and also features special exhibitions throughout the year.

The distinctive building, Wright's last major work, instantly polarized architecture critics upon completion,[2] though today it is widely revered.[3] From the street, the building looks approximately like a white ribbon curled into a cylindrical stack, slightly wider at the top than the bottom. Its appearance is in sharp contrast to the more typically boxy Manhattan buildings that surround it, a fact relished by Wright who claimed that his museum would make the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art "look like a Protestant barn."[2]

Internally, the viewing gallery forms a gentle helical spiral from the ground level up to the top of the building. Paintings are displayed along the walls of the spiral and also in exhibition space found at annex levels along the way.

Most of the criticism of the building has focused on the idea that it overshadows the artworks displayed within, and that it is particularly difficult to properly hang paintings in the shallow windowless exhibition niches that surround the central spiral.