The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is getting a facelift and among the most pressing dilemmas is what color to paint the building’s exterior.
There’s buff yellow, the original color of the exterior selected by Frank Lloyd Wright, the museum’s architect.
There’s also a shade of off-white that, with slights variations, has been the museum’s public face over the years.
Warm yellowish beige, cool grayish white? Powell buff or London Fog?
Some preservation groups, pointing out that Wright abhorred white, favor restoring the building to its original color while some neighborhood associations prefer the museum’s proposal to keep it a shade of off-white.

Guggenheim’s exterior: buff yellow or off-white?
For me, this is akin to Gottfried Semper’s revelation that all of the famous Greek buildings were adorned in polychrome so completely hideous, that we should thank the hands of time for eradicating makeup fit for the red light.
Similar thanks be to black and white film, which recorded the bulk of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, who’s color choice is equally suspect. While FLLW is a master in tectonic materials – stone, wood and brass – his later Taliesin West years strayed into a palette which we would today call “Scottsdale Pastiche.” With heavy emphasis on Redwood, rammed earth and primary colors his later work was revolutionary, and we can imagine highly copied; but from today’s vantage point, dated is the word due to the misuse (paging Taco Bell) of this palette in suburban houses around the world.
Which is to say, that the color choice is a difficult one; thankfully the Landmarks Preservation Commission has the final say over what paint the Guggenheim will wear for the next twenty years: the authentic paint color which evokes an Arizona tumbleweed, or the inauthentic slightly drab color we all know.