Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York rebuilds the museum typology by reducing a building's internal circulation — stairs, floors, corridors — to a single continuous gesture. The traditional museum is a labyrinth toured room by room, in which the visitor constantly stops and chooses a direction; Wright turns it into one uninterrupted path.

The interior is nothing but a helical reinforced-concrete ramp that widens slightly upward. The visitor rides a lift to the top and then, without climbing a single stair, follows the spiral down a gentle slope, touring the whole collection in one continuous walk. The display wall is not flat but tilts slightly outward — as if a painting were resting on an easel. At the centre of the space is a vast void (atrium) descending from a glass dome at the top; from every point the visitor sees this central void and the other people on the opposite ramp — the building reads itself completely from within.

From outside, too, the building is a white, upward-widening spiral mass defying the right-angled Manhattan grid around it — not a building but almost an abstract sculpture. Using the continuous, curvilinearly castable nature of reinforced concrete, Wright builds a structure in which space, structure, and circulation melt into a single form. The Guggenheim is one of the most original public interiors of the 20th century, turning the museum from a 'series of rooms' into a 'continuous experience'.