Mason’s Reviews > The Killer and Frank Lloyd Wright: The True Story of Mass Murder in Paradise > Status Update

Guggenheim: The new museum would take Frank more than a decade to build, and the final result was awe-inspiring. The exterior was designed to resemble a seashell with logarithmic spirals, while the interior turned the conventional museum setting on its head by guiding visitors from the top of the building downward on a continuous ramp overlooking an open rotunda.

Frank described the uniqueness of the museum to reporters. For the first time, a building has been designed that destroys. everything square, rectilinear," he boasted. "You see paintings under the same conditions in which the artist did them, as they would rest on an easel, Wuminated by a mixture of light and artificial light. Its a building that creates (an] atmosphere instead of a frame in which to show a painting

Commisioned to build a museum in New York City to house works of art of businessman Solomon R. Guggenheim. Frank referred to his new design as "Archeseum, a building in which to see the highest" amid a city filled with "soulless skyscrapers." Some New Yorkers were less than flattering when describing the building, which to them looked at best like "an upside down cake" and at worst, a "great stone toilet bowl."

Frank grabbed a pencil and three pieces of colored tracing paper, one to design the basement, the next to design the first foor, and the last to sketch our what he wanted the second foor to look like. His apprentices all stood around wondering if this was how it felt to watch Mozart or Beethoven compose one of their classical masterpieces. In just two hours, Frank Lloyd Wright had designed... Fallingwater.