Saunders Architecture, FLW in His Element, 2009 All images courtesy Guggenheim Museum.

In conjunction with its 50th anniversary the Guggenheim Museum sponsored a design challenge, inviting almost 200 artists, designers, and architects to propose treatments for the signature spiraling atrium of its Frank Lloyd Wright building. The collection of proposals, Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, is on view now through April 28, and also posted on the museum’s website. The show offers a compelling snapshot of contemporary design currents, particularly of green building strategies.
     The entries, and the media in which they’re presented, are impressively diverse. There are crayon drawings, watercolors, and pencil sketches, laser-cut models and computer renderings. The most straightforward proposals place one object within the building’s enormous central space. Different designers propose a chandelier, a hot air balloon, a column of water, a cloud of pigment, an oil rig, and the body of an Airbus A380. The more tectonic proposals, which respond to the space’s forms and circulation, are less inspired. Many designers install mirrors to distort perceptions of the space, build interconnecting passages within the space, and extend the existing curving ramp upwards, downwards, and outside the shell of the building.