The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has commissioned the New York firm Asymptote Architects to design and implement a new Guggenheim Museum in cyberspace. The first phase of the Guggenheim Virtual Museum will be launched at the end of 1999 as part of a three-year initiative to construct an entirely new museum facility. The structure will be an ongoing work in process, with new sections added as older sections are renovated. The project will consist of navigable three-dimensional spatial entities accessible on the Internet as well as real-time interactive components installed at the various Guggenheim locations.

For Asymptote, this important new work highlights their ongoing interest in merging technological possibilities with spatial manufacture, experience, and event. When speaking of an architecture for the next millennium there are two conditions to consider the physical space of architecture as we have always known it where enclosure, form and permanence will undoubtedly persevere, and the realm of virtual architecture, now emerging from the digital domain of the Internet. Objects, spaces, buildings, and institutions can now be constructed, navigated, comprehended, experienced, and manipulated across a global network. This is a new architecture of liquidity, flux, and mutability predicated on technological advances and fueled by a basic human desire to probe the unknown. The inevitable path for both these architectures, the real and the virtual, will be one of convergence and merging. Historically architecture has always struggled with this dialectic of the real and the virtual, where the stability and actuality of architecture is tempered by the poetic and the ineffable nature of meaning and experience.

The Guggenheim's own history, architectural vanguardism and cultural significance will serve to form a unique scaffolding for this museum of the future. By combining the richness of this tradition with the potential offered by state of the art digital technologies, Asymptote aims to create a new architectural paradigm. The Guggenheim Virtual Museum will not only provide global access to all Guggenheim Museums and their services, amenities, archives, and collections but will also provide a unique and compelling spatial environment to be experienced by the virtual visitor. In addition, the virtual museum is an ideal space for the deployment and experience of art and events created specifically for the interactive digital medium where simultaneous participation, as well as viewing is made possible for an audience distributed around the globe. As envisioned by Asymptote and the Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Virtual Museum will emerge from the fusion of information space, art, commerce, and architecture to become the first important virtual building of the 21st century.

--Matthew Drutt, Guggenheim Museum
--Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, Asymptote Architects, New York