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Happy 52nd to the Guggenheim Museum!

The legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum in New York City with a characteristically organic image in mind. He envisaged, he said, the structure as “a curving wave that never breaks.”

On October 21, 1959, when the Guggenheim opened its doors for the first time, the museum-going public was generally approving (or perhaps just good-naturedly bemused). Not a few of the major art and architecture critics at the time, however, were dismissive, and worse. Confronted with Wright’s bold, utterly unique conception, The New York Times called the design “a war between architecture and painting in which both come out badly maimed.”

(see more early photos of the Guggenheim here.)