What is the place of the museum in the modern city? What role does architecture play? How can these buildings be effectively interpreted?
Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan broke with all existing conventions, setting a new standard for the postwar art museum and, together with the Museum of Modern Art, firmly establishing the city of New York as the cultural capital of the 20th century. A decade later, the significance of this new architectural genre was not lost on Georges Pompidou when he commissioned the cultural center that would eventually carry his name—and launch the successful careers of its architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers—hoping that it would position Paris as New York’s cultural rival.
