The inverted snail shell that houses New York’s Guggenheim turns 50 this year, and to celebrate the museum has organised an ode to its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward. Wright strides, Paul Bunyan-like, through the history of US architecture, a towering figure who domesticated modernism and elevated his personal aesthetic into a utopian ideal. What a shame the festivities feel so funereal. It’s not easy to drain a rich and vivid figure of colour and life, but this musty survey looks backwards in boredom.

Lloyd Wright at the Guggenheim during its construction (c1959)

Even the spiral looks dimmer than usual, probably to accommodate the vast number of delicate drawings that constitute the show’s faintly beating heart. Architects and antiquarians will be thrilled to see so many elevations and cross-sections, but others may struggle to imagine their three-dimensional realisations. And attempts to meet amateurs halfway cancel themselves out. The museum has commissioned several new models, including a miniature of the Jacobs House suspended in mid-air and fragmented into its component parts like an illustration in an Ikea manual. An assortment of computer animations evokes the experience of moving through the drawings, but not through the buildings themselves. And projected photographs are almost exclusively black-and-white, making even buildings that are in daily use seem like relics of a distant past.

The show feels like a trip into a dismal depository. The curatorial team, made up of delegates from the Guggenheim and the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, seems to think there’s something polluting about the present, and have determined to preserve Wright’s legacy in an aspic of period photographs.

We’re told nothing of the man, the context, the soil he grew out of or the influences he absorbed. The curators show no interest in questions about his continuing relevance, the evolving condition of his buildings (a particularly apt issue, since construction and maintenance flaws have plagued them), and his legacy in the 21st century.

This bizarrely formalist, historically disconnected show does hit all the high points of the architect’s career. It also conveys the scope of his interests, which took in affordable housing, city planning, museum design, private homes, synagogues, schools and churches. But it treats each building like a sculpture, isolated in solemn beauty. And on the subject of the flamboyant, deceitful genius himself, the curators wax taciturn. Are they concerned his biography might contaminate his achievement?

Editing Wright’s life out of the narrative leads to curious contortions. A text panel about Taliesin, the home he made for himself and his mistress Martha “Mamah” Borthwick, reads: “Taliesin is his most autobiographical work, its iterations tell both a compelling architectural story and a personal, human one.” What story, you ask? Let’s just say the note neglects to mention Mamah, for whom he left his wife and six children, or the scandal that almost shattered Wright’s career.

The exhibit is equally laconic about Taliesin’s destruction, offering only this précis: “An employee brutally murdered 7 people and set the house on fire.” Never mind that a killing spree is by definition brutal – the curators drop a bomb then ignore the explosion of curiosity. Did they assume everyone knew about the episode, or would they have preferred not to mention it at all? What happened is this: in 1914, while Wright was away, a servant locked the doors and windows, poured gasoline into all the cracks and corners, and hacked residents to death as they tried to escape. The victims included Mamah and her two children.

Wright rebuilt his life and his house, but Taliesin succumbed to fire again in 1925. A third incarnation still stands, though you would hardly know that from all the assembled artefacts. On a screen, a computerised tour guide floats through a version of the interior, but doesn’t specify which. Nearby, projections on a topographical model chronicle Wright’s land acquisitions. As for what it actually feels like to visit or work in the compound now: nothing.

If the bucolic Taliesin embodied Wright’s domestic ideal, the city remained his perpetual enemy. He saw density as congestion and towers as battlements that blotted out the horizon. He kept returning to the project of dissolving the metropolis, though his attacks took on picturesque names: Broadacre City, Disappearing City, Crystal City and Living City. In 1957 he produced a plan for greater Baghdad that synthesised Middle Eastern fantasy and Midwestern suburbia. The car, in his view, unsealed the urban maze, and he romanticised the limitless horizons – and unbounded sprawl – it opened up. Now would be a good time to evaluate the real-life repercussions of Wright’s exurban vision. The show, of course, does no such thing.

The focus of the Guggenheim’s interest in Wright is, predictably, Wright’s Guggenheim. Visitors who toil up the ramp get their reward when the show flares briefly to life. A detailed original model offers all the usual delights of miniaturisation. Drawings suggest the variety of Wright’s rebellion against Manhattan’s relentlessly grey street grid: he dreamed up a hexagonal ziggurat in robin-egg blue, a fuchsia wedding cake and a curled golden ribbon before settling on the cool white cone. And in an rare stroke of vividness, the curators have assembled a loop of images from the museum’s history of interior disguises. Matthew Barney carpeted the floors in blue synthetic turf. For “Brazil”, Jean Nouvel coated the walls in a deep, velvety black to offset the colossal, glittering altarpiece that rose up through the atrium. Wright designed a living museum; it has repaid him by very nearly killing him off.

Continues until August 23