Maybe this is petty, but it's kind of a basic thing: The exteriors of the Guggenheim, as well as the Strong Planetarium are cylindrical in plan, not spherical.

Speaking of petty... plans are two-dimensional representations of a horizontal cut of a building's interior or of its site. Exteriors are not represented in plan (they are represented in elevations), and even if they were, they could neither be "cylindrical" nor "spherical," as those are three-dimmensional objects, and plans, as I already said, are two-dimensional representations. Having said all of that,the exterior shape of the Gugenheim is not a cylinder. It is more like a cone whose tip has been lopped off.

slippedvoussoir:

Speaking of petty... plans are two-dimensional representations of a horizontal cut of a building's interior or of its site. Exteriors are not represented in plan (they are represented in elevations), and even if they were, they could neither be "cylindrical" nor "spherical," as those are three-dimmensional objects, and plans, as I already said, are two-dimensional representations. Having said all of that,the exterior shape of the Gugenheim is not a cylinder. It is more like a cone whose tip has been lopped off.

I suppose I should have left out "in plan".... While it's untrue that exteriors are only shown in elevation (ever build a roof? ... a roof plan is useful...), technically speaking I was also incorrect, as both buildings are circular in plan, right?

In any event, I wasn't referring to the 2d representation, I was referring to the 3d construction. The upshot being that whether the buildings/cylinder(s) are tapered or uniform, and no matter how the 3d object is represented on paper, in no case do they bear any resemblance to a sphere.

And so much for all that.

Cylinders, by definition, don't taper. So I would argue that describing the building as cylindrical is no more accurate than describing it as spherical. The Sugarloaf project is actually a hemispherical dome with the ramps wrapped around it.

I'm surprised you didn't take Kaplan to task for a much more egregious error, which was to suggest that the Guggenheim museum led to the creation of other "spiraling" buildings like Mies' Neue Nationalgallerie and Pei's East Wing, neither of which have any relationship at all to spirals.