New York’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. In the 1970s the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice was united with the New York museum under the aegis of the Guggenheim Foundation, establishing a precedent for an institution with an increasingly global footprint that now includes destinations in Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and will eventually include the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
Over the course of many years Pentagram has worked with the Guggenheim on various identity and publication projects. In 2009, we were asked to design a new identity and website for the Guggenheim Foundation. Based on Frank Lloyd Wright's lettering on the facade of the Guggenheim, Jonathan Hoefler's font Verlag is now the lingua franca of the global Guggenheim. The designers developed the website as a "front door" to the collection of museums. ID Society produced the site based on Pentagram's design.
In developing an identity for the Foundation, Miller has once again used Verlag, but this time in uppercase, to suggest a kind of über-Guggenheim or parent organization. This creates a subtle hierarchy between the Foundation and its constituent museums.
The Foundation website similarly acts as front door or gateway to the five museums. A simple menu bar at the top of the site allows for navigation between locations and the Foundation itself. Within the individual museum sites the navigation is more complex, reflecting the unusually deep content of the sites, which allow visitors to browse the online collections of each museum. A blog-like editorial format is used for news of current exhibitions, events and activities.
