Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The building you are approaching began as a radical departure from everything else in New York City when it opened in 1959. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the museum as an inverted ziggurat, a structure that widens as it rises toward a glass ceiling. While it is now a celebrated landmark, many contemporary critics famously derided the design, calling it an imitation beehive or a giant toilet bowl. Wright himself held a deep disdain for the city's standard grid of rectangular buildings, and he insisted on this organic, circular form as an act of architectural rebellion.