Eight of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s most notable buildings have now been named UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and the Guggenheim Museum on the Upper East Side—which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year—is among them.
The addition of Wright’s buildings to that list of significant cultural sites was announced on July 7 at the World Heritage Committee’s meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, which was convened to select sites to be added to the UNESCO list. In addition to the Guggenheim, the Wright buildings that are now heritage sites includes Fallingwater in Mill Run, PA; the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles; the Frederick C. Robie House in Chicago; and both of the architect’s Taliesin homes, in Wisconsin and Arizona.
The Guggenheim, which opened in 1959, was one of Wright’s last completed works, although he received the commission for the building in 1943. Philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and his art advisor, artist Hilla Rebay (who also became the museum’s first director), chose the architect based on his reputation; Wright was in the later part of his career, with landmark buildings like Oak Park’s Unity Temple and Fallingwater behind him.
There was just one stipulation from the museum co-founders: “The building should be unlike any other museum in the world.” Wright delivered and then some.
“The Guggenheim Museum is honored to receive this internationally esteemed designation that recognizes the significance of Frank Lloyd Wright’s contribution to cultural heritage,” Richard Armstrong, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, said in a statement. “As we celebrate 60 years as an architectural icon, our Wright-designed masterpiece continues to serve as a beacon and inspiration for visitors from around the world.”
In addition to the Guggenheim, there’s just one UNESCO heritage site in New York City: the Statue of Liberty, which was given that designation in 1984. All told, there are just two dozen heritage sites in the United States, most of which are national parks or other natural sites. Wright’s architecture, as our colleagues at Curbed noted, “joins a rare class of modern architecture thus honored, which also includes select works by Le Corbusier. No other modern American architecture holds this distinction.”
The Guggenheim is Wright’s only public building in Manhattan, and one of only a handful of projects he worked on in New York City—a place he famously did not like. His other extant building in the city is the Crimson Beech, a prefabricated home on Staten island that was built in 1959. The Hoffman Auto Showroom on Park Avenue, which Wright designed in 1954, was demolished in 2013.
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