Frank Lloyd Wright, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 1942-1959발음듣기
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(lively piano music) Steven: This is Steven Zucker, standing outside of the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, with Matthew Postal, an architectural historian.발음듣기
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Standing outside of one of the most iconic buildings in New York, certainly one of the most unusual buildings.발음듣기
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We're walking up 5th Avenue.발음듣기
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Rows of prewar limestone and glazed brick buildings, of approximately the same height.발음듣기
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Rectilinear, these boxes really.발음듣기
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Then you come across this wild construction.발음듣기
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What is Wright thinking?발음듣기
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Matthew: He wanted to design something that would leave a mark, an unforgettable mark in Manhattan.발음듣기
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Steven: Frank Lloyd Wright does this at the end of his career.발음듣기
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Actually, the dating of the building is a little bit complicated.발음듣기
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He was hired in ...발음듣기
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Matthew: In 1943.발음듣기
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Steven: The famous model that we often see him and Hilla Rebay with, and Solomon R. Guggenheim himself dates to 1945, but then the building doesn't get built until 1959.발음듣기
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What accounts for the delay?발음듣기
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How does this work?발음듣기
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Matthew: There were a lot of challenges.발음듣기
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There was the Second World War, there was a downturn in the economy in the late 40's.발음듣기
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There's the Korean War.발음듣기
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Then, finally, there is the issue of, how do you build a spiral museum entirely out of concrete?발음듣기
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Steven: It's really complicated to even describe.발음듣기
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From the front you've got these two main masses, and this bridge that links them.발음듣기
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There's a tremendous kind of unity, I think, of form.발음듣기
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The circle repeats itself over and over again.발음듣기
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What is similar to what he did before?발음듣기
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Matthew: From the very start he's interested in geometry.발음듣기
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He's interested in patterns.발음듣기
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He would use patterned brick work.발음듣기
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He would use patterned floor treatment.발음듣기
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He liked patterns.발음듣기
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Whether they were hexagons or octagons or triangles.발음듣기
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Here's an opportunity to do a circle.발음듣기
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Steven: You see them everywhere.발음듣기
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Built into the sidewalk in front of the building.발음듣기
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Of course, you see it in the rotundas themselves.발음듣기
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It's Farris concrete, right?발음듣기
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It's held up with rebar?발음듣기
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Matthew: You know, his early buildings are basically poured concrete.발음듣기
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Blocks of concrete.발음듣기
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Like Unity Temple.발음듣기
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Although, he probably used metal to strengthen the concrete in some places.발음듣기
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This building, because of the width of the ramps, and the walls and it all has to be one continuous surface, requires a lot of different types of cage-like metal, to hold up the structure.발음듣기
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Steven: He's doing something incredibly ambitious, by keeping this atrium completely open, by having these cantilevered ramps that circle through the atrium, and give us the exhibition space.발음듣기
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We see even more cantilevering on the outside of the building.발음듣기
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The whole thing seems incredibly precarious, pushing the limits of engineering.발음듣기
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In that it kind of reminds me of its visual precedent, which is to say, something like the Pantheon.발음듣기
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That's really using concrete in enormously new, and important ways.발음듣기
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Matthew: This is certainly like the Pantheon, and the Hagia Sophia, in it's inspired by expressionist architecture, of the 1910's and 20's.발음듣기
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Steven: Especially in Germany, right?발음듣기
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Matthew: In Germany.발음듣기
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Steven: And Austria, yeah.발음듣기
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Matthew: When you think about it, it's one thing to have these ideas, it's another thing to execute it.발음듣기
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Steven: To realize it.발음듣기
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Matthew: Wright had great drawings.발음듣기
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He had a terrific model.발음듣기
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He had a patron with money.발음듣기
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The real question was, how was he going to do it?발음듣기
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Ultimately, the person who built it for him, deserves a lot the credit.발음듣기
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The contractor was a man who built parking garages.발음듣기
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Steven: Didn't Frank Lloyd Wright also design, a auto showroom on Park Avenue that actually has a ramp?발음듣기
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Matthew: That's right.발음듣기
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Steven: For the cars.발음듣기
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That's very much in the style of the Guggenheim.발음듣기
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Matthew: And a store in San Francisco.발음듣기
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Steven: The museum was originally called, the Museum of Non Objective Art, which was an early way of saying abstract.발음듣기
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It's now called the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.발음듣기
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Guggenheim came from a very wealthy family.발음듣기
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They had made their money in mining.발음듣기
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We also mention this woman Hilla Rebay.발음듣기
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Matthew: Hilla Rebay was from Germany.발음듣기
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She was an abstract painter.발음듣기
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She came to the United States in the 1920's.발음듣기
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She exhibited quite frequently, and she met Solomon when his wife commissioned a portrait of him.발음듣기
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Steven: There's a really interesting disconnect, because when we think of Frank Lloyd Wright as an architect, I think we often think of him as antithetical.발음듣기
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As really in opposition to the European modernists.발음듣기
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And yet, here he is creating the structure that's meant to house them.발음듣기
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Matthew: He wasn't the first choice.발음듣기
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When it was suggested to Hilla Rebay to hire him, she reportedly said, "I thought he was dead."발음듣기
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Matthew: They considered several architects.발음듣기
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Ultimately, Wright was well-known, there was a lot of attention paid to him, after Falling water was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.발음듣기
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The Museum of Modern Art had given him a retrospective in 1940.발음듣기
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Steven: Was it originally intended for this site?발음듣기
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5th Avenue just across the street from Central Park, 88th, 89th Street?발음듣기
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Matthew: Solomon Guggenheim had begun to finance his museum in the 1930's.발음듣기
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They moved to various locations.발음듣기
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They had a space where Lever House is today on 54th Street.발음듣기
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Clearly, they wanted an iconic building.발음듣기
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They wanted a building of great visibility.발음듣기
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Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a distant cousin of Robert Moses, who was the head of planning in New York City, actually traveled around Manhattan in an open Cadillac, looking for an ideal location.발음듣기
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Steven: It's only a few blocks north, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.발음듣기
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Great bastion of classicism.발음듣기
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Was it in any way, kind of consciously taking on that tradition, do you suppose?발음듣기
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A museum had always been a kind of palace architecture.발음듣기
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Matthew: I think it's a pretty radical endeavor.발음듣기
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Every building draws on other building.발음듣기
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Clearly, Wright was trying, as he was almost always trying, to create something new.발음듣기
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Steven: What does that do to the art that it contains?발음듣기
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Does it overwhelm or does it frame it in a way, that draws the art out and excites us visually?발음듣기
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It's a funny and ambitious but also, I think, combative relationship with the modernism that's shown within the museum.발음듣기
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That is, the container is an object in the collection, isn't it?발음듣기
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The issue is, should the museum be a neutral container?발음듣기
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Should paintings be hung in simple, white boxes?발음듣기
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Or should the architectural design contribute to the aesthetic experience?발음듣기
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Steven: There is a kind of push and pull, and there is a really kind of modernist conceit here, in that it actually raises that question.발음듣기
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That the building doesn't recede into the background.발음듣기
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It remains very much in the foreground, and forces us to grapple with those kinds of questions.발음듣기
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Kind of zealously guards its own primacy.발음듣기
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There's always this kind of antagonism then, between the rectilinear and two dimensionality of the canvas, and the dynamos of the structure.발음듣기
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Matthew: Is that a good situation for paintings to be displayed?발음듣기
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Steven: Maybe not paintings themselves in isolation, but perhaps one of the issues is that, when we get to the modernist era, we don't think about paintings in isolation.발음듣기
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We think about the way in which contexts construct meaning.발음듣기
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Wright is asserting this quite powerful context.발음듣기
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Matthew: I think Hilla Rebay wanted to break boundaries, and I think Wright was a perfect candidate to do it. (lively piano music)발음듣기
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