Guggenheim Museum Invites Architecture Students to Judge Shelter Competition

Students at Taliesin, the architecture school founded by Frank Lloyd Wright, are known for the shelters that many of them design, build, and inhabit in the desert surrounding the school’s winter campus, in Scottsdale, Ariz. So it’s only appropriate that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—whose building in New York is perhaps Wright’s most recognizable work—invited Taliesin students to judge entries in a shelter-design competition that the museum is sponsoring with two Google offshoots, Google SketchUp and Google Earth. The former allows users to create virtual three-dimensional models, while the latter is a geography application.

While Taliesin students are limited to building on the 500-acre campus, people entering the competition can virtually locate their entries anywhere on the planet, but the shelters can be no taller than 12 feet and can have interiors no larger than 100 square feet. The shelters “must offer protection from the elements and provide a space for one person to study and sleep,” but they are not permitted to have water, elecricity, or gas. As of Thursday, 231 designs had been submitted (they’re absolutely worth scrolling through, by the way—and be sure to note among the samples provided by the competition’s creators the 1937 shelter that the noted California Modernist John Lautner created while he was a student of Wright’s). The last day for submitting entries is Sunday.

The competition is part of the museum’s celebration of its 50th birthday—it opened in 1959, just a few months after Wright’s death at age 91. The architecture school dates to 1931, and moves its students each year between Wright’s Arizona property, known as Taliesen West, and the original Taliesin, his property in Spring Green, Wis.