Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
An art museum by the river in an industrial city, clad in titanium sheeting in free, undulating forms that could only be designed and built with the help of computers. The building transformed the city’s reputation and gave its name to the “Bilbao effect”: the idea that a spectacular building can lift an entire city.
Bilbao was an industrial city in crisis, with closed shipyards and steelworks along the River Nervión. The Basque regional government wanted to regenerate the city and entered into an agreement with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, which wanted to open museums outside the United States. Frank Gehry received the commission after a limited competition in 1991, and the museum was built from 1993 and opened in October 1997. The free forms could not be drawn by conventional methods. Gehry’s office used CATIA, a program developed for the aerospace industry, to calculate the forms and control the fabrication of the steel frame and cladding. The façades were clad in thin sheets of titanium, combined with limestone and large areas of glass.
The museum is built around a tall atrium, where glass walls and curved balconies meet and light floods in. From the atrium visitors reach the galleries, which are of three kinds: straight, classical rooms in the limestone section, irregular spaces within the free forms and a very long gallery resembling a ship. Here stand Richard Serra’s large steel sculptures, The Matter of Time, which visitors can walk through. The building sits low by the river and connects to the La Salve bridge, which passes over part of the museum and is caught up by a tower. Outside stands Jeff Koons’s Puppy, a gigantic dog made of flowers, and facing the river Louise Bourgeois’s spider Maman.
The museum received enormous attention and immediately became one of the world’s best-known buildings. Visitors came in great numbers, and the city changed: the port and industrial areas were redeveloped, and Bilbao gained new parks, bridges and a metro. The term Bilbao effect spread, and many cities around the world tried to repeat the success with spectacular cultural buildings, not always with the same result. The museum is often seen as a turning point in architecture, where the computer made entirely new forms possible to build. In Sweden, too, the Bilbao effect has been discussed when municipalities have planned new cultural centres and art galleries, and the idea that a single building can change a city’s image features in many later projects, including in northern Sweden.