Frick Museum and Guggenheim museum

Central park development brings the wealthier New Yorkers to the 5th avenue looking for prime real estate in New York City. Thanks to them, now we have several large-scale houses next to Central Park, built by Carnegie, Kahn, and Frick. Some of those houses become museums, like the Frick museum. But there was still a place for the development of new buildings in this area in the mid-20th Century like designed museum Guggenheim.

Frick museum was built to become the museum just after the owner dies. Henry Clay Frick was collecting arts from all over the world, and today we can see pieces of Rembrandt of Francisco Goya in this museum. The Frick is one of the first small art museums in the United States. It has a high-quality collection of old paintings as well as dozen sculptures, porcelain, and 18th-century French furniture and oriental rugs. It has 19 showrooms which are sometimes hard to follow. House is square with many side rooms and central garden, built-in ancient Rome style.

On the other side, the Guggenheim building was designed to be an only museum, nothing else. It is an art museum with the collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern and contemporary art. It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and at that time very controversial.  It is a cylindrical building, wider at the top than the bottom and was conceived as a “temple of the spirit”. Its unique ramp gallery extends down from just under the ceiling skylight in a long, continuous spiral along the outer edges of the building to the ground level. In some parts, it was modeled by Pantheon in Rome, with its round shape of building and oculus at the top of the roof.

Both museums are state of the art for themselves. Frick Museum is a presentation of an old museum with several side rooms and a lot of art packed in a small area, while Guggenheim is representing modern museum with a round cylindrical gallery that starts on top and ends at the bottom. Space in the Frick museum is better for displaying the art pieces because of the existence of corners and flat walls, while that is not a case in Guggenheim because of the curved walls and organic forms. Frick museum was built in 18th-century European style architecture, while Guggenheim was built from concrete in modern organic style. Both of these museums are amazing and represent one whole within the museum mile and without each other, they will not be that popular.