Peggy Guggenheim Museum

ROMA, FALL '19

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro sestiere of Venice, Italy. The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palace, which was the home of the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim for three decades. Palazzo Venier dei Leoni’s long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome “caesura” in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces. The original building is unfinished, and has an unusually low elevation on the Grand Canal.

Lashings of concrete embellished with decorative features strip the elevation around the museum, forming appendages of vertical circulation from indoor to outdoor and horizontal differentiation from the framework of the existing façade. The ground floor embraces the “acqua alta”, or tidal flooding; the water sliding in with every passing gondola, and rising up and down with the tides, passes into the building to rest in pools of stationary display. Walkways circulate to rise with hung artwork, and serve to elevate sculptures overlooking the Grand Canal. A terrace balcony crowns the museum café and founts natural refreshments to pass throughout the surface of the museum, to rest at the grave of Peggy Guggenheim.