Wikipedia:Meetup/Guggenheim Museum/2014

This meetup page is an archive of a past event. Please do not edit the contents of this page.

The Guggenheim Museum hosted a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon centered on the topic of Museum Architecture.

Museum Architecture Edit-a-thon

When and Where
Date	October 7, 2014. (Archives Week)
Address	Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
City, State	New York City, New York

Event information

• Host Projects: Wikipedia:GLAM/Guggenheim Museum, and Wikipedia:GLAM/Metropolitan New York Library Council
• Date: Tuesday, October 7, 2014.
• Time: 2-8pm
• Location: New Media Theater (for speaking program) then Media Labs in the Sackler Center, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York. Please enter at the 89th Street entrance.
• Cost: Free
• Speakers: Alan G. Brake, Executive Editor of The Architect's Newspaper, Cara Cragan, Director of Architectural Projects, Helsinki and Abu Dhabi (SRGF), and Amanda Parmer, curator and founder of PARMER
• Participants: The event is open to anyone who wishes to help expand the topic of museum architecture on Wikipedia. No Wikipedia editing experience necessary; 3-4pm will be devoted to the fundamentals of Wiki editing. As needed throughout the event, tutoring will be provided for Wikipedia newcomers.
• Registration: - event is past.
• What to Bring: Attendees should bring their own laptops and power cords. Light snacks and drinks will be provided.

Resources for Beginners

• First things first - create a Wikipedia Userpage ("Create Account" in top right corner of any Wikipedia page).
• Wikipedia:Meetup/Guggenheim Museum/guide - Linked resource for beginning editors.
• Institutional Partnerships with Wikipedia / Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, Wikipedia Info Booklet - This guide has directions on the various Wikipedia projects, and includes a guide for beginners, guides to Wikipedia markup, adding references, and other tasks.

Suggested articles to edit

Below is a list of articles that would benefit from edits and expansion, specifically about the museum's architectural history, during the edit-a-thon.

Articles still to be created:

• Anssi Lassila
• Helena Säteri
• Erkki K.M. Leppävuori
• Mikko Aho
• Ritva Viljanen
• Liu Yuyang
• Clemente de Thiene

For further inspiration

See also:

• Guggenheim Helsinki Revised Proposal, 2013.
• The Role of Architecture in Defining the Museum's Image, Gilles Duffau, 2006
• Guggenheim Archives Collections
  • Frank Lloyd Wright Correspondence (A0006): The Frank Lloyd Wright correspondence spans the years 1943 to 1959 and documents the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright through the course of planning and constructing the new museum building at 1071 Fifth Ave. The collection consists of letters, telegrams, memoranda, newspaper clippings, transcripts of speeches, and financial records relating to the SRGF. To view digitized records, visit the collection finding aid and toggle open the "Folder List." Correspondence from this collection, as well as drawings and photographs from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation are also available in the book "The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum" and in an interactive timeline.
  • Films on the construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (A0005): The films were created and collected as documentation of the construction, opening, and early exhibitions of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and located at 1071 Fifth Ave. The museum building opened to the public on October 21, 1959. While it was constructed, Wright designed a temporary structure, the Wright Pavilion, located at the corner of 89th Street and Fifth Ave., which opened and held the exhibition, "Sixty Years of Living Architecture," in 1953. The Pavilion was demolished by mid-1956. Highlights of the collection include footage of Wright in the "Wright Pavilion Construction" and Richard Leacock's cinematography in "Guggenheim Museum Construction." [Select films will be available at the edit-a-thon]
  • Collection of Guggenheim-Related Artifacts and Ephemera (M0018): This collection is a collection of materials donated to the archives or collected by Guggenheim staff. The film from this collection contains footage of the museum in construction, taken by Dr. and Mrs. Abraham Ravich and donated in loving memory by Robert Ravich. [This film will be available at the edit-a-thon]
  • Guggenheim Reel to Reel Collection: This collection contains audio of past lectures on the history and building of the museum, as well as general topics related to architecture. Abstracts are listed for select audio, some of which has been digitized. To listen to the digitized audio, visit the collection finding aid and toggle open the “Folder List.” Keyword search for the lecture title, then click on the red hyperlink.
    • Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim Museum / Poser, Mimi; Berg, Henry; Goldberger, Paul; Stern, Robert, 7/13/1977 (615205, T03): Paul Goldberger, an art critic for The New York Times, Robert Stern, an architect and Henry Berg, Deputy Director of the Guggenheim Museum discuss Frank Lloyd Wright’s building and its relation to the display of art. The main debate here is whether the museum should be thought of in a pure utilitarian way, or whether it should be recognized as an art form in itself. They discuss how the Guggenheim building is a fixed space in which the owner has limited creative freedom, since it was built by a great collector that had an idea of what art was at the time, making a museum for that specific idea. They then talk about the physical experience of viewing an exhibition at the Guggenheim, the use of natural light and its origins in relation to the Larkin Building.
    • Guggenheim Museum / Svendsen, Louise Averill, 4/13/1967 (615213, T27): Louise Averill Svendsen is interviewed by Art History professor Vivienne Thaul Wechter at Fordham University. She speaks about the main differences between American and European museums in regards to audience and research, about women’s role in museums and about how loans and exhibitions are organized at the Guggenheim. Svendsen focuses on the Guggenheim’s particularities such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s building and the fact that the museum is the result of the gift of one man’s private collection, setting a stamp on the institution. She compares it to the Museum of the Museum of Modern Art, speaks about the move toward a gallery attitude in museums and rivalry between and within museums. She then takes questions from the audience, regarding Pollock, museum work, conservation, understanding contemporary art and realism.
    • History of the Guggenheim / Lawson-Johnston, Peter; Krens, Thomas, 1/29/1990 (615213, T30, T31): Lawson-Johnston, President of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, talks about the founding of the museum by his grandfather and some important phases of its development. He speaks about his grandfather, his relation to Hilla Rebay, his parents, how the Foundation came about and its different directors. Thomas Krens, Director of the Museum, gives an overview of its ongoing projects and future goals. He describes the history of the museum’s location, collection expansion and building. He believes that the institution’s space needs to be practically reevaluated. He then gives a glimpse of what is to come due to the limits in space that the Guggenheim is facing and speaks about the Foundation’s projects overseas. He mentions the challenges in Venice and finishes his speech by speaking extensively about the Foundation’s plans to open a museum in Salzburg, Austria.
    • Architecture of the Guggenheim Museum / Drexler, Arthur, 11/15/1961 (615215, T28, T29, T30): This is a talk by Arthur Drexler, Director of the Architecture and Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art, about the Guggenheim Museum’s architecture and how it evolved in the mind of Frank Lloyd Wright. He lists aesthetic and practical complaints that are often made about the museum. Drexler links the origins of the building to Wright’s project on a manmade mountain in Maryland and his concern with the spiral shape. He compares these ideas to a project by Le Corbusier and to Wright’s idea of a picture gallery in 1919. He talks about Wright’s first sketches for the Museum, how the spiral ramp evolved, how the building was successively cut down and focuses on the use of a bump at the start of the ramp. Drexler insists that Wright thought that a building was greater than its individual parts and its details were to be an expression of some internal necessity, even if these were awkward. He ends his lecture by saying that the building’s difficulties can be easily remedied and smoothed out and that the building, as Wright had put it, is a ‘defective masterpiece’. [Not available online. A recording is available at the edit-a-thon.]
    • Architectural League Debate / Jencks, Charles; Graves, Michael; Stern, Robert, 4/25/1984 (615215, T26, T27): This recording is a debate (“Frank Lloyd Wright was a modern architect, not a modernist”) between the two architects and theorists Charles Jencks and Michael Graves, moderated by Robert Stern. Jencks argues that Wright is not a modern architect as understood by the last definition of the modern movement (purism, minimalism…) because he was always committed to the three main areas that modernism omitted, those of symbolism, ornament and metaphor. Jencks uses many of Wright’s buildings as examples. Graves actually agrees with Jencks, adding that Le Corbusier or Gropius’ versions of modernism are not without symbolism either, and that one of the main differences with Wright is that his architecture can be very tectonic and closer to the humanistic tradition. They discuss a few of Wright’s buildings, focusing on classical methods, symmetry and asymmetry, place and under-design. Some questions are taken from the audience (most are not audible). [Not available online. A recording is available at the edit-a-thon.]
    • Architecture: Silence and Light / Kahn, Louis, 12/3/1968 (615215, T31, T32): Architect Louis Kahn explains his view on the relation between silence and light in regards to architecture. He believes that buildings have a desire to be, produce a sense of silence and that light is the maker of all things. He feels that there is no other reason for living than to express, to respond to light and nature. He compares the work of man and the work of nature, highlighting how one cannot reach another, but how both are marvelous. Kahn goes on to relate architecture to the making of manmade institutions and natural light. One of his main points is that desire is in man’s nature and that intuition is still the source of man’s most worthy work. [Not available online. A recording is available at the edit-a-thon.]

The Guggenheim on Wikipedia

• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Wikimedia Commons Category

Results

Press

• Rebecca Mir. Go “Guggathon”! How We Collaboratively Edited Architecture Pages on Wikipedia.

Resources

• Wikipedia:Wikipedia for Libraries Archives Museums
• Citing Finding Aids on Wikipedia

Tools and templates

• Template:Infobox person
• Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons
• Cheatsheet for editing Wikipedia
• Writing an article
• About the Sandbox

Attendees Sign-up

Please add your Wikipedia username to the appropriate section below. Registration required. If you do not register here, on Wikipedia, please register on Eventbrite. link

Confirmed

1. OR drohowa (talk) 13:38, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
2. Mlynch345 (talk) 01:44, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
3. Prpldv06 (talk) 16:40, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
4. shaug80 (talk)
5. Angel Ayon (talk) 13:22, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
6. Lone Crab Hand (talk) 11:56, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
7. GChriss <always listening><c> 01:46, 20 September 2014 (UTC)
8. WilliamDigiCol (talk) 15:34, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
9. Carolyn22789 (talk)
10. Dwhitewdc (talk) 19:55, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
11. Ssilvers (talk) 01:05, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
12. Pharos (talk) 10:23, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Tentative

1. Rangilo Gujarati (talk) 22:39, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
2. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:39, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
3. [Your username here]

Regrets

1. Mozucat (talk) 15:56, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
2. [Your username here]

Online If you cannot make it to the museum in person but would still like to participate, you are more than welcome to do so remotely. So that we can count you as having taken part, please add your name to the participant list below and also add any and all contributions under the #Results section.

1. nwhysel and daughters
2. Kippelboy from Barcelona (probably not exactly at the same hours but pre-post the same day)
3. ginamshelton
4. Walknadexplore
5. Lange.lea