The making of the modern museum
Abbott Miller has designed The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum, a book chronicling the museum’s 50th anniversary.
The motifs of the book are inspired from the museum’s architecture and Wright’s iconic style:
The design translates the famous Guggenheim spiral into an iconic typographic composition, its concentric circles evoking the view from the top of the rotunda. A collage of news clippings and correspondences of important events and players adorns the endpapers. The distinctive rusty red color throughout the book is inspired by Wright’s palette. …. Red bars striping the page edge create a visible band along the fore-edge of the book’s pages.
Miller has worked with the Guggenheim for nearly 15 years on everything from its publications to the website. In ‘96, he asked Jonathan Hoefler to create a typeface based on the lettering found on the façade of the building — “Guggenheim,” now called “Verlag.” The font is now the display font in the book.
