contemplating the void: interventions in the guggenheim museum
solomon r. guggenheim museum, new york
on now until april 28th, 2010



like frank lloyd wright’s guggenheim itself, 'lightcone' by american firm
iwamotoscott architecture forms a choreography of light, art and movement
through space.

informed by wright’s spiral-conical geometries, 'lightcone' combines three different
arrays of suspended fiber-optic lines:
1) the central conical array transmits and transforms the light of the sky from the large
overhead skylight.
2) the surrounding spiral array pulls in the changing light of the city outside from
the spiraling skylights that follow the ramp. at night these two arrays switch over to
artificial light powered by batteries, solar-charged from transparent photovoltaic film
applied to the skylight glass.
3) the peripheral array’s mediated light projects images from the NY guggenheim’s
collection. fed from a digital database, these images can be arranged in a variety of ways:
by default they are organized chronologically along the building’s five ramped galleries into
five decades. within each structural bay between the supporting piers, the viewer can
use an interactive device to reorganize a sampling of the collection by artist, by genre,
by size, by color, etc.

'lightcone' ultimately attempts to further wright’s interests in exploring the plasticity
of structure, the continuity of space, and 'bringing the circle into the third and fourth
dimension', while integrating five decades of content from the guggenheim’s collection
into the building’s spatial experience.



















credits:
lightcone design and visualization:
iwamotoscott architecture, san francisco, CA
principals: craig scott , lisa iwamoto
project team: stephanie lin, blake altshuler, ryan golenberg, magda melo