Guggenheim Museum

From Writer's Almanac:

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in New York City in 1959. Guggenheim himself was a mogul of the mining industry, and after his retirement in the late 1920s, he turned his energy to collecting art, contemporary art by people like Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Vasily Kandinsky, and Marc Chagall. He housed his work in a small sales room in Manhattan, but the collection outgrew the space. So he invited the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a museum.

Guggenheim kept putting off the actual construction of the museum, and he and his art advisor, a German baroness, kept demanding that Wright change things. It ended up taking 16 years from the time Wright was hired until the museum actually opened its door. Guggenheim died in 1949, but he set aside $2 million for the museum, and a couple of years later they finally broke ground. Frank Lloyd Wright died in April of 1959, six months before one of his most famous buildings opened.

References:
Writer's Almanac.