The top picks from the “most green” and “most important” lists: William McDonough’s Adam Joseph Lewis Center (left) and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

This week, when Lance Hosey released the G-List, his survey of the top green buildings since 1980, he was responding to Vanity Fair’s celebrity rankings of the top-rated buildings of the last 30 years, which anointed Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao as the most important building of our time. But Gehry’s name was nowhere to be found on the G-List. Why was I searching for some signs of him among the greens? Read more…

With all the hoopla surrounding last year’s 50th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s death and the opening of his landmark Guggenheim Museum, readers may have overlooked a spate of new monographs about the American master. Among the most noteworthy are the second and third volumes of Taschen’s exhaustive three-volume Complete Works, covering the periods 1917–1942 and 1943–59, respectively (Volume I, covering 1885–1916, is due out in August), and a trio of titles by Rizzoli—Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, an elegant catalog of last year’s Guggenheim exhibition; Frank Lloyd Wright, The Heroic Years, which focuses on the years 1920–1932, a bleak but exceptionally creative period in Wright’s life; and Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master, a handsome overview of his career, featuring hundreds of new photographs.

There is, of course, no dearth of books about Wright. Amazon lists no fewer than 2,376 titles. While these five volumes may not blaze any new trails, each of them is well organized and finely crafted, and together they provide a rich, multifaceted picture of one of the titans of American architecture. Regardless of how one views Wright’s work, anyone perusing these books cannot help but be struck by the extraordinary scope and astonishing abundance of his creative output. From his modest Usonian houses for the middle class to his grand estates for corporate titans; from his inspiring and innovative buildings for work, worship, and culture to his grandiose schemes to reinvent the modern city, Wright was constantly expanding and refining his architectural vocabulary. Read more…

The vast majority of the architects and artists that submitted work to Contemplating the Void—an ongoing exhibition at the Guggenheim that re-imagines Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic building in fanciful, and often humorous, ways—have also contributed those pieces to an online auction that will run through next week.

About half of the 178 items up for auction have yet to receive any bids, and only a quarter elicited more than one offer. The works range from the whimsical, to the psychedelic, to the esoteric, but if there’s a trend, it has more to do with the art-makers than the objects themselves; generally, it’s the fine artists and not the architects that have garnered more, and higher, bids (maybe because they’re easier to collect). Beyond that, it’s hard to see broad differences in approach or style. Some projects look like schematic architectural sketches, others more like plans, paintings, or posters. The works range in estimated value from $500 to $25,000, which, we’re guessing, is a little steep for most people. But with opening bids starting at $150 (and all proceeds going to future museum programming) it’s probably as close as many of us will get to owning a museum-quality print. After all, if you can’t afford a Toyo Ito house, at least you can buy his drawing.

After the jump, images of some of the lots and their auction status as of this morning. Read more…

Last night was the press preview for The Wright, a sleek new restaurant shoehorned into a tiny space at the southwest corner of the Guggenheim Museum. For anyone who remembers its former manifestation—a maroon-walled café crowded with tables and framed photographs—the new interior will seem like a major departure, and an appealing one at that. Designed by the New York architect Andre Kikoski, it is pristine white with a few bold exceptions: the saturated-blue banquettes, a curving walnut wall above the bar, and a series of powder-coated aluminum planks mounted to the walls and ceiling. The last turns out to be a site-specific sculpture by the British artist Liam Gillick (who also happens to be Kikoski’s neighbor) titled The horizon produced by a factory once it had stopped producing views.

As for the cuisine, it will be what you might call Upper East Side comfort food: seared diver scallops, Maine lobster, slow-roasted suckling pig. (The chef is Rodolfo Contreras, a David Bouley protégé.) The Wright opens to the public on December 11. A few more snapshots follow, after the jump. Read more…

The new Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition at the Guggenheim represents a remarkable bit of curatorial restraint on the part of the show’s organizers. Although the show takes up pretty much the entire building—starting near the bottom of the rotunda with the early Oak Park years and then ramping chronologically all the way to the top and concluding, fittingly, with the Guggenheim Museum in New York (along with a couple of unbuilt projects)—the exhibit is a mere fraction of the Wright archive.

“We have enough material in the archive to mount a show of similar scale every year for the next 110 years,” said Phil Allsopp, the president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, at a press event this morning celebrating the show’s opening. Read more…

Architecture buffs who missed the opportunity to spend a night in the Guggenheim last fall may soon get a second chance—well, sort of. The winning design for Abu Dhabi’s five-star Helix Hotel, by Leeser Architecture, includes a spiraling floor plate that looks like a cousin of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous snail-shell structure. But, of course, the Helix—which is the centerpiece of a new waterfront development adjacent to Zaha Hadid’s dune-like Sheikh Zayed Bridge—boasts a legion of luxury amenities, standout among them a rooftop deck with glass-bottom swimming pool (so you can admire your fellow guests’ bikini bods from eight stories below). Leeser is also working with Atelier Ten on sustainable features like an interior-cooling waterfall and GROW cladding on the outside surface. If this all sounds a tad bit too ambitious for the current recessionary climate, fear not: even with neighboring Dubai’s economy in free fall, Abu Dhabi is forging ahead with several high-profile building projects, including its very own, for-real branch of the Guggenheim, by the loose-lipped Frank Gehry.

Check out additional images of the Helix Hotel after the jump. For more on Leeser Architecture, read Metropolis’s stories on the World Mammoth and Permafrost Museum and the 3LD Art & Technology Center. Read more…