In Manhattan, New York, I entered this unique building. It is hard to believe this building was built 70 years ago, and I looked up at the ceiling from the ground floor and stepped into a private restroom.
This museum stands on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, New York. It is one of New York’s most famous museums and is known for its spiral design. Central Park sits across Fifth Avenue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is about five blocks south of the museum.
The current building opened in 1959, so nearly 70 years have already passed. Many museums have unique designs, but this building still has a strong impact even today. The white cylindrical building becomes slightly wider toward the top. Its unusual shape is clear from the outside, but the inside is even more surprising.
I looked up from the first-floor lobby. The space rises all the way to the ceiling, and spiral walkways circle around the open center. I took the elevator to the top floor on the eighth level. From there, a spiral ramp slopes down all the way to the first floor. Exhibition spaces line the walls along this spiral walkway.
The building seems to circle around the center about five times in total. When I visited in 2025, the spiral ramp held a special exhibition, and plants hung down into the open space in the center. Along the spiral walkway, the museum does not simply hang artworks on flat walls. Instead, the space has small recessed sections divided into areas about five meters wide.
There were also two larger gallery spaces around the third and fifth floors, and these rooms displayed the Guggenheim collection. The museum shows both modern and contemporary art, but compared with Museum of Modern Art, I felt the exhibitions leaned more toward contemporary art.
The café sits around the second floor. However, the museum’s spiral design makes the idea of a normal “floor” feel unclear.
What interested me most were the private restrooms placed throughout the museum. Each restroom is unisex and designed for one person, and the inside space feels surprisingly compact. A pillar stands very close to the front of the toilet seat, almost as if the limits of the building’s design had been pushed directly into the room itself.
When I visited in 2016, the museum displayed a working 18-karat gold toilet that reminded me of Marcel Duchamp’s famous artwork “Fountain” inside one of these restroom spaces. At the Guggenheim, I felt that not only the artworks, but also the building and even the facilities themselves, become part of the artistic experience.
The Guggenheim Museum also has branch museums in Venice, Italy, and Bilbao, Spain. Both are excellent museums. I also saw references to Abu Dhabi in photos displayed inside the museum, but at the time I wrote this article, the museum there had not yet opened.
This Guggenheim museum in New York also left a strong impression on me because it held a retrospective exhibition in 2015 for On Kawara, one of the pioneers of Japanese conceptual art, after his death in 2014.
The artworks may depend heavily on the special exhibitions taking place at the time, but the museum itself is a fascinating place from the viewpoint of experiencing the space itself, and I highly recommend visiting it.
Visited in 2003, 2016, 2025
Basic Information
■ Name : Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
■ Address : 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY, USA
■ Homepage : https://www.guggenheim.org/
