Groups Mull Guggenheim’s Exterior Paint Color
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The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is getting a facelift and among the most pressing dilemmas is what color to paint the building’s exterior.
There’s buff yellow, the original color of the exterior selected by the museum’s architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. There’s also a shade of off-white that, with slights variations, has been the museum’s public face over the years.
Warm yellowish beige, cool grayish white? Powell buff or London Fog?
Some preservation groups, pointing out that Wright abhorred white, favor restoring the building to its original color while some neighborhood associations prefer the museum’s proposal to keep it a shade of off-white.
The associations argue that the building was buff yellow only for its first five years and that there have been four additions to Wright’s circular structure, which opened in October 1959 months after the architect’s death.
“This is not black and white. It’s an extremely complex question, as stupid as that sounds for mere paint,” said Pamela Jerome, director of Wanks Adams Slavin Associates, the project’s preservation architect.
Chairwoman of Friends of the Upper East Side Historic District, Seri Worden, believes the museum should be as Wright envisioned it.
The paint job is part of a $27 million facelift that began in 2005.
