In late October 1953 Frank Lloyd Wright had an archway hewn into the firewall of the Guggenheim’s original townhouse in New York. (This was before Wright’s tumbler-shaped museum.) Through the opening visitors stepped into a temporary pavilion and a seven-room, fully furnished Usonian house. “Sixty Years of Architecture,” Wright’s extensive self-directed retrospective, dubbed the “greatest show ever” by his Taliesin disciples, had toured the world since 1951. Its versatile 8 × 8 foot pre-fab panels had occupied a Gimbel’s department store in Philadelphia and Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, then traveled on through Paris, Zurich, Munich, Rotterdam and Mexico City back to New York. 

Wright hired local architects to reposition the walls for each venue, among them J.J.P. Oud in Rotterdam and Otto Bartning in Munich. The panel system’s designer was modernist Oscar Stonorov whose square design was a tribute to Wright’s evolving scenographic ideas. An astounding eight hundred drawings, plans, and photos were pinned up on free-standing boards. While separated by medium, photos, which had previously been relegated by Wright as documentary supplements inferior to drawings, were blown-up as murals—a fashionable practice since the 1930s. Models lounged in leafy Western-themed rock and shrub gardens. 

The absence of a gallery in New York stands out as a serendipitous chance for the exhibition designers to create a total environment from scratch, a venue that was perhaps better suited to Wright’s vision than a Renaissance palazzo. The structure was erected with ordinary scaffolding. Its roof sloped westward toward 5th Ave, covered with ribbons of wire glass. What the few surviving, mostly black and white photos omit is Wright’s atmospheric use of color and lettering. His allusion to the vast American landscapes of the West included a deep Cherokee red for the wall panels and pedestals and the moss green leaves of the plants. Intense, warm sunlight pervaded the pavilion—an effect so important that, after dark, spotlights on tall poles outside simulated the external light source, and an effect that would become a fixture at the permanent Guggenheim Museum.

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