The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Building
Frank Gehry (born 1929) · 1993 to 1997
Before you go inside, walk the length of the building along the river. From the promenade the museum looks like a ship that has run aground in the old port, its titanium panels rippling like fish scales and changing colour with every cloud that passes over Bilbao. Frank Gehry drew the first sketches as loose scribbles, then modelled the forms by hand and translated them into steel with aerospace software, which is why nothing here is a simple box. The limestone blocks facing the city are the calm part; the metal curves facing the water are the show.
Look closely at the titanium. Each panel is only about half a millimetre thick, thinner than a coin, and fixed so that it can flex in the wind, which gives the surface its soft, quilted look. Gehry chose the metal after seeing a sample glow in the rain outside his office, and Bilbao gets plenty of rain, so the building is at its best on a grey day when the sky seems to pour down the walls. Notice also how the building tucks itself under the Salve bridge and rises on the far side as a tall tower, so that the motorway became part of the composition instead of an obstacle.
The museum opened in October nineteen ninety seven and changed the fortunes of a city that had lost its shipyards and steelworks. Visitors arrived in numbers nobody had predicted, and the phrase Bilbao effect entered the language of every mayor hoping a museum would rescue a town. Few have managed it, partly because few buildings are this good. One detail to remember: Gehry insisted that the ground floor sit below street level, so that the great atrium could soar fifty metres without the building looming over the neighbourhood.
Did You Know? The titanium came from Russia and was rolled in Pittsburgh; the price dropped just long enough for the museum to afford it instead of stainless steel.
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