Hasta La Ideas

Today is Frank Lloyd Wright‘s birthday, and while we’ve been busy transforming a tower of fondant and Heath bars into an elaborate Fallingwater-themed cake, New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is celebrating the 142nd anniversary of Wright’s birth with a global design contest. The Guggenheim has teamed with Google (a match-up that we can’t help but refer to as “Googlenheim”) for today’s launch of the Design It: Shelter Competition, which invites amateur and professional designers to use Google Earth and Google SketchUp application to create and submit designs for virtual 3-D shelters for a location of their choice anywhere on Earth (anywhere? anywhere!). Submissions will be accepted through August 23. Two prize winners (one will be chosen by a jury that includes architect Neil Denari and Pentagram’s Lisa Strausfeld, the other by public voting on ten finalists selected by students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture) will be announced on October 21, the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum’s opening. Our advice? Get inspired by visiting the Guggenheim’s stellar “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward” exhibition and then head to the museum’s Sackler Center for a companion exhibition of shelters designed, built, and lived in over the past seven decades by students of Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Arizona and Wisconsin.