Frank L. Wright

He was born 20 years before cars were introduced but Frank Lloyd Wright was "eerily prophetic in understanding how the car would transform the American landscape," reports Ingrid Steffensen in the New York Times (8/9/09). This understanding also manifested itself in his architectural designs, particularly "his masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in New York," whose spiral rotunda and ramps is "linked to the mundane parking garage." In fact, Wright had previously designed a parking garage that "was a giant, off-kilter layer cake of ramps, with concrete ribbons snaking around a central parking core."

Wright’s idea was "that visitors should take an elevator to the top of the ramp inside the Guggenheim, and then allow gravity to help them in their gentle centrifugal descent as they admired the artistic scenery … the smooth forward motion and interrupted spatial flow of the ramps are an architectural equivalent to automotive motion … Like a highway for art, the Guggenheim’s ramps … created a new viewing paradigm in formed by our shared American love for life experienced through the windshield."

Wright, whose first car was a 1909 K Stoddard Dayton roadster, thought cars would doom urbanism because they would "decentralize the American way of life." He designed the first house, the Robie House in Chicago, with a three-car garage in 1909, well before cars "became a ubiquitious accessory to American homes. He also coined the term carport and often incorporated them in his modest homes of the 1930s." The Guggenheim is currently presenting a retrospective of his work, "Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward," to note both the 50th anniversary of his "death and the opening of the Guggenheim."