Where engineering meets design
From its wheelchairs to its famous spiral ramp, the Guggenheim teams up with Yale Engineering to rethink the museum experience.
This story originally appeared in Yale Engineering magazine.
Photos by Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Filip Wolak
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is now considered an iconic work of 20th-century architecture. Completed in 1959, the art museum’s building is known both for its dramatic spiral exterior as well as the “single continuous floor,” as Wright described the building’s interior ramp.
But in the intervening 65 years, a lot has changed in New York City, in the world, and in museums. So has the way the Guggenheim activates its architecture through exhibitions and programming, cultivates its relationship to the city, and defines its role as a public and civic space.
“We at the museum have been thinking a lot about that intersection of architecture and visitor experience,” said Chitra Ramalingam, director of academic engagement at the Guggenheim. “Not just how to realize the museum’s potential as an inclusive educational civic space, but as a space of connection and belonging.”
As a former faculty member at Yale, Ramalingam was familiar with the Center for Engineering Innovation & Design (CEID). When she moved to the Guggenheim in 2023 to develop new kinds of academic partnerships, CEID Executive Director Joe Zinter, Ph.D., was one of the first potential collaborators she reached out to. Together with Ashlyn Oakes, M.Arch, the CEID’s program manager, they began discussing a full collaboration, in which students would spend the semester exploring these big questions at the core of the Guggenheim’s spatial and cultural identity. Many of the challenges Ramalingam and her colleagues were wrestling with are just the sort of things considered in “Making Spaces (ARCH 390/ENAS 410),” a course that Zinter and Oakes teach. This interdisciplinary course, blending principles of engineering and architecture, invites students to explore how design and technology can enhance museum experiences for a broad public.
Over a period of several weeks, Ramalingam, Zinter, and Oakes worked out a plan for the Spring 2025 course, defining five challenges to spark the students’ innovative spirits. The end result, Ramalingam said, was “an incredible success.”
“The students were so engaged, so thoughtful and creative,” she said. “They asked such smart and probing questions. They really got right to the heart of these five different challenges, often in ways that I and my colleagues at the museum hadn’t necessarily considered. So I was really, really impressed by that.”
An interdisciplinary course cross-listed between Engineering and Architecture, Making Spaces collaborates with clients who work with the students to reimagine a space, often in ways that go beyond simply identifying a technical solution or architectural intervention. It’s a complex challenge that requires the students to work across disciplines to develop creative solutions and designs, while considering feasibility, viability, desirability, and other constraints.
In other words, it’s the perfect course for considering museum space. Shortly before it closed for renovations in 2020, Making Spaces teamed up with the Peabody Museum. Students worked closely with museum representatives to develop ways for Peabody visitors to experience the renovated galleries. A student project from that collaboration became the basis for a start-up company, Amuse Technologies, which is now the navigation platform being used in the Peabody Museum. In other years, the course has worked with the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, for which students developed interactive tours and other innovations.
Working with the Guggenheim proved to be just as fruitful a collaboration.
“As one of the world’s most influential and iconic museums, collaborating with the Guggenheim was a very exciting opportunity and the course garnered tremendous interest from students,” Zinter said. “The challenges presented by Chitra and her team were multifaceted and nuanced, and they required our students to develop deeply creative and holistic solutions that engaged with the cultural, spatial, and human dimensions of the museum experience.”
The students were divided into five teams, each tasked with finding a new way to approach a different aspect of the museum. The class included guest lectures and a tour of the Guggenheim itself.
“It was inspiring to work with such a talented and interdisciplinary group of students, whose diverse perspectives led to these creative and innovative solutions,” Oakes said.
Here’s a look at the five projects that came out of the course:
Accessibility Team:
Students: Halyn McKenzie, Selma Mazioud Piper Jackman, Caleb Nieh
Although the Guggenheim was designed around an icon of accessibility — a ramp — some parts of the building unfortunately remain inaccessible to visitors using wheelchairs. These areas include the High Gallery and the Aye Simon Reading Room. The student team proposed two interventions to support a more inclusive visitor experience at the museum, while preserving the building’s architectural integrity.
First, they offered two iterations of an intervention to open the stepped entrance into the High Gallery to wheelchair users — one, a more traditional and compact ramp that curves around the central staircase, compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act; the other, a flat plane extending from the gallery floor, leveraging the existing slope of the rotunda ramp.
The team also reimagined the standard wheelchair the museum currently loans out to visitors, updating it with easily attachable and removable design elements. The redesigned chair features a black powder-coated frame, custom 3D-printed logo wheels, upgraded casters, and integrated storage — offering both enhanced functionality and a refined look to match the aesthetic of the museum.
Education Center Team:
Students: Tian Hsu, Jason Nuttle, Brandon Lin
The team set out to create a suitable storage solution for books, art supplies, and other materials in the museum’s Gail May Engelberg Center for Arts Education. Specifically, they wanted to “create a learning space that feels seamlessly integrated with the Guggenheim’s architecture — organic, inviting, and reflective of Wright’s vision.”
That meant helping the museum’s art-making and classroom spaces better express the ethos of its programs: to be a place where all visitors, especially children, can feel inspired to learn, play, and engage with art.
“We focused on developing a unique storage solution that bridges aesthetic and functional gaps to make the education center feel more welcome to all,” said Tian Hsu.
The customized shelving system, like much of the Guggenheim, would be curvy with rounded edges, reflecting the museum’s architectural language. The shelf translates the museum’s cross-section into a continuous, flowing form scaled to the human body and adapted for practical storage and displaying children’s art. The museum plans to install the shelf in the Engelberg Center.
Wayfinding Team:
Students: Nathan Sih, Willa Hawthorne, Nayan Birnbach, Laura Zeng
The team was tasked with enhancing Wright’s vision of the building as a space that encourages wandering, but at the same time ensuring that visitors can still find their way around in a space that can be very disorienting.
“I think it’s very easy to get lost in the space, but that is also the essential character of the building,” Laura Zeng said. “How do you lean into the architecture of the building while also making it easier for people to navigate the space?”
Not wanting to interfere with the architectural character of the building with intrusive lighting or signage, they decided to make a 3D scale model of the iconic building that could serve as a tactile, interactive map. Featuring a 3D-printed interior and laser-cut acrylic exterior panels, the model offers a transparent glimpse into the building’s intricate geometry and distinctive architectural character.
“The scale model is often used as an informational tool, but we were really excited about the prospect of using it as a wayfinding tool, specifically,” Zeng said.
Relationship to NYC Team:
Students: Sityana Abdu, Luis Guevara-Flores, Jonah Heiser, Abby Zheng
This team worked on how the museum could better connect with the vibrant communities that surround it in New York City. Could an intervention on the patio by the museum’s Fifth Avenue entrance offer a more inclusive invitation, enhance visitors’ first-time impressions, and blur the lines between what’s inside and outside the museum?
The Guggenheim, they noted, can seem like an imposing building. “In our design process, we wanted to think about ways to bring something from the inside that made people that are outside feel welcome to go inside,” said Sityana Abdu.
They used the building’s famous domed skylight, the Lawson-Johnston Family Oculus, as the inspiration for a participatory public sculpture rooted in principles of placemaking and playmaking. This interactive scale model of the Oculus was fitted with individually cut, colorful acrylic pop-out panes. Passersby could interact with the eight-foot-tall structure by spinning it and rearranging the pieces. By inviting the co-creation of ever new versions of the Oculus, the project reinforces the Guggenheim’s connection to its community.
Sound Team:
Students: George Ploumis, Alina Susani, Henry Kaplan
Museums are multi-sensory spaces, and the curved, concrete surfaces of the Guggenheim make it a complex — and sometimes challenging — auditory environment. Rather than seeing its unusual acoustics as a problem, the team embraced them. How could they create a memorable experience for Guggenheim visitors out of the unique sonic character of the space? Their first step was to think of the building as a sonic instrument itself.
This led the three students to design the Whispering Bench, an interactive sound installation for the sidewalk outside the museum designed to catch people’s attention and then activate as they pass by. Approaching the circular bench, designed to evoke the building’s circular form, triggers an audio recording that offers passersby a sensory preview of the reverberating sound within the museum. The team intends the piece to spark curiosity, draw visitors into the museum, and encourage a deeper awareness of how form and material influence sound.
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Published Date
Apr 29, 2026
