ART
AND
ARCHITECTURE
103
arts and sciences took place. Later the Musee Mondial became a center
of the "Cite Mondial," a planned town for the seat of the League.
The newest addition ( 1945) to this type of structural projects comes
from the Museum of Non-Objective Art of the Solomon R. Guggen–
heim Foundation, called The Modern Gallery. Its collection is to be
housed in a seven story building in New York, closely located to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
I quote from the announcement:
"Starting in the theatre below the ground it would be easy to go
in a wheel chair and come safely down again without undesired inter–
ruption. Or taking the fast ramps, concentrated in a tower on one side
of the Grand ramp, visitors go quickly up and down. Elevator service
is stationed at the center of this tower and is directly connected with
the grand ramps at each level. Two plunger elevators are located at the
center at each recurrent ramp level. The open center of the grand,
central chamber, made by the ramps, is wider at the top than at the
base by about twenty-four feet, and open to the sky but covered by a
shallow glass dome shedding night-light as well as daylight.... The
main structure is monolithic throughout, pre-stressed steel in high ten–
sion reinforcing high pressure concrete. The exterior and interior will
be faced with polished marble-aggregate. The only exception in the
greatly extended groundfloor surface which will be a continuous pave–
ment of large marble slabs."
As seen in the illustration the spiral ramp-tower is held in place
by the rectangle of the administration building which envelops it from
two sides, leaving the other half open to the Avenue.
The collection of abstract and non-objective art was started in
1929 and contains some of the most charming paintings by Chagall
("Paris through the Window") and Kandinsky.
Said F.
L.
Wright: "They call the advanced ideas animating this
art (for lack of a better name) non-objective painting.... A contro–
versy, concerning what it represents, has raged down the ages-rages
still. And we hope to see it rage to good effect here, at home, in the
perennial struggle for the time, the place and the man."
Nautilus pompilius
