Hasta La Ideas

If this was The Daily News, I’d lead off with the sensationalist headline “Frank Lloyd Wright Fathered More Children Than New York City Buildings!” But while that’s the truth, it’s hardly noteworthy; of his more than 1,000 commissions, he only accepted three in Gotham—one house in Staten Island and just two spaces in Manhattan.

One of those spaces was the Hoffman Auto Showroom on Park Avenue, completed in 1955. Though tight by auto showroom standards at just 3,600 square feet—this was in Manhattan, after all—the space contained plenty of drama. The main room was dominated by an ascending, semicircular ramp that encircled the de rigeuer rotating auto platform.

The rotating platform was large enough to fit four cars on it, bringing each one around like a sushi restaurant for auto enthusiasts. The upwards-sloping ramp could fit another three cars, and also had space for customers to walk between the cars and the barrier, allowing them to ascend the ramp and view the cars on the platform from above.

Sound familiar, that bit about the curving wraparound ramp? The Hoffman Auto Showroom has been described as a “forerunner” and “precursor” of Wright’s design for the Guggenheim, as the former opened in 1955 and the latter broke ground in 1956. But while that’s semantically accurate, it might give you the misimpression that the Guggenheim’s ramp was inspired by an automobile showroom. Which is not true. Those of you who’ve sat through interminable semesters of History of Architecture will recall that Wright spent over a decade on the Guggenheim design. Three out of four of his original Guggy sketches, from 1943 and ’44, featured the wraparound ramp. It’s more than likely that the Guggenheim design influenced the Hoffman showroom, and not the other way ’round.

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