The Atrium
Frank Gehry (born 1929) · 1997
Step through the entrance and the building opens like a flower. The atrium rises fifty metres, half again as high as the rotunda of the original Guggenheim in New York that Frank Lloyd Wright built, and its walls twist in white plaster, glass and limestone as though they were caught mid movement. Glass walkways cross it at different heights, a lift climbs inside a glass tower, and long windows frame the river and the hills of Artxanda beyond. Gehry called this space the flower, and the galleries branch off it like petals on three levels.
Stand in the middle and look up. The curved glass curtain walls are held by a fine steel lattice and let daylight pour down the walls, so that the atrium changes character through the day, cool in the morning, golden in the afternoon. The floor is stone and the walls are plaster, deliberately plain, so that the shapes do most of the work. Note how every stair and bridge is slightly off axis; Gehry wanted movement, not symmetry. Look also at the way the ramp curls up toward the galleries on the river side.
The atrium is the hub of every visit, and it is also where the museum hangs some of its largest site specific works. Jenny Holzer's columns of scrolling text in Basque, Spanish and English stand on the river side of the hall, glowing red and blue, and the outdoor works by Koons, Bourgeois and Kapoor are visible through the glass. Many people spend their first ten minutes just walking around this hall, and that is a fine way to use them.
Did You Know? Gehry built a scale model of the atrium so that he could sit inside it with his head poking through the floor and judge the space from a visitor's eye level.
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