Contents

1. Foreword
2. Introduction
3. The City.
4. The Guggenheim Foundation and Thomas Krens.
5. The Architect.
6. The Building.
7. Inside the Museum
8. Other Museums.
9. Conclusions
10. Bibliography

 

Foreword

The art museum symbolises the interest of the mankind in the last two and a half centuries, in compiling in an orderly and systematic fashion objects and works of art from all ages, and exhibit them.

Museums of all kinds are being opened: local museums, museums of wine, shoes, coffee, decorative arts and more. At the same time, is impossible to visit in one day the traditional but now oversized museums.

The Aleph allegory of Jorge Luis Borges becomes a reality, but in a friendly way. The cues by the entrance of most museums prove that.

Museums as such have offered ample opportunities to contemporary architects to express themselves quite freely. Over recent years, however there has been a trend to convert the building itself into an attractive piece of visual art.

In that context, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is a paradigm of some of the significances of the new museum and the new museology in the last years of the 20th Century/

Gehry’s building, taking into account the characteristics of the chosen site, blooms as a new exiting way of exhibition, but also as a new language talked by the architect, the town and the visitors.

Introduction

 No other art museum has had such an impact on a city as the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum (BGM) has had on the Basque capital. Major museums such as El Prado in Madrid and the MoMa in New York, despite their unique collections, are structurally without visual significance, and are not urban landmarks. Whereas the Pompidou Centre or the Tate Modern are landmarks in the geographical and cultural sense, neither is an icon of their cities as is Bilbao’s Museum.

Its visual language, so different from Bilbao’s urban landscape, at once draws the attention of the visitor in what would be an otherwise monotonous panorama. Even though the city was once an important industrial shipyard centre, for decades since the depression in the shipbuilding industry, it was a town struggling for survival. At the end of the 20^th century, unemployment was the highest in all Spain, rising to 25%. But this city on the banks of the Nervion River aimed to renew the old power and energy it once had as a naval centre. In a campaign named “Bilbao the Global City,” visitors come to Bilbao not only to admire Calatrava’s airport or Foster’s underground stations, which are merely decorative preludes,but

to see the real thing … the Museum.

 The cultural ecology of Europe demanded for Bilbao something equivalent to the Sydney Opera House in terms of building iconography. In a unified Europe, where national identities are less significant, and cities take over the lead, the mega star building helps to define which is the most important city.

The Museum building marks the place where a shining chevalier popped up to save a Basque maiden from the chains of depression. Thus it has become a focus of interest and pilgrimage, not only for art lovers, but also for tourists

and architects.

This research is concerned with the social, economical and technical forces that make Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao the city’s icon, whatever the artistic merit of the pieces exhibited within. It also deals with his importance of to Frank Gehry’s career, as a showpiece for his works and achievements. The work is theoretical and its raison d’être is curiosity-driven by my former studies in architecture and museology and a new perspective of the museum’s functions after my first visit to Bilbao in 1998.   As with many other museums of art built during the last third of the 20^th Century, the Guggenheim Bilbao is a huge monument to the people engaged in the enterprise as well as a receptacle or a shrine for the art

contained therein.

Although the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation and his former director Krens play a vital role in the entire Bilbao Museum, in this work I’ll refer only to the most relevant facets of that engagement, perhaps leaving to further research the investigation and development of the effect that the Foundation has on art, economy and culture world-wide.

Often, a museum of Modern Art (or Contemporary Art) is compared to a temple where secular rituals take place[1]. That definition suits Bilbao’s museum, reminiscent in more than one way to the position of a cathedral in the Middle Ages urban hierarchy. The cathedrals as religious and civil entities were, and in some cases still is, the centre, pride and icon of most towns where they were built. In Spain itself, Santiago de Compostela leading to its Cathedral – “El Camino de Santiago” – has much of that sense.

 [1] Carol Duncan dedicated a book to the subject, Carol Duncan Civilizing Rituals,  Routledge, London,   1995. and the same approach has Francisco Cerver in the book cover of his book The Architecture of Museums, Hearst Books Int., New York, 1997

 Many art museums conceived and built or modified during the last third of the 20^th Century became architectural or design icons (Pompidou Centre in Paris, the new wing at the National Gallery in London, Reina Sofia in Madrid, Villa Borghese in Rome, Kunsthale in Rotterdam) but compared to Bilbao’s none of the above is the only great building in the city. Even those that are tourist Meccas share the public’s interest with other attractions in the same city, (British Museum in London, Louvre in Paris, Stedelijt in Amsterdam). In all those senses, Bilbao Guggenheim Museum is outstandingly different. Its shape and size compared with the city’s other institutions, while the formidable flow of visitors and the almost ritual visit to the place make the building a sort of milestone in the life of every cultivated person. Frank Gehry, elevated by the public sometimes to the position of a guru, designed one of the most outstanding constructions of the last century, dealing at one and the same time with the expected comparison made by critics between the two major “Guggenheims”, New York and Bilbao.

The City

In the national census of 1996, the last one held in the province of Biscay, we learn that Bilbao has a population of nearly 360,000 inhabitants while the Museum has 1,000,000 visitors a year. This number is relevant when we compare the figures presented by the British Museum which is the most visited museum in England, of around 5,800,000 a year, of whom 1.4 are from the UK and 4.2 from outside the UK.

First steps
The ambitious plan to bring the Guggenheim Museum to Bilbao got under way in February 1991, when high-ranking representatives of the Basque authorities contacted the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation with a proposal for the latter to take part in the moves to revitalize Bilbao in particular and the Basque Country in general. The Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation welcomed the proposal warmly, as they had recently approved a long-term development plan for the Foundation involving a number of different centres distributed throughout the world, thereby creating a coordinated group of cultural institutions worldwide.             

 

In December 1991, after months of negotiations, Joseba Arregi, Basque Government Minister for Culture, José Alberto Pradera, chief executive of the Diputación Foral (Provincial Council) of Bizkaia and Gianni De Michelis, member of the Board of Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, signed the Development and Programming Services Agreement for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao at the Provincial Council’s headquarters in Bilbao.

 

Birth of an idea
The choice of Bilbao as the venue for one of the Guggenheim’s European centres is best understood in the context of the initiatives implemented by the Basque authorities to contribute to the process of revitalizing the Basque country’s recession-plagued economic structure. These initiatives were also seen as a means of increasing the chances of the city’s metropolitan area to become the major reference point for European regions on the Atlantic seaboard.

 

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is one of the most important ingredients in the plan to redevelop the city of Bilbao. The plan, involving a number of major projects conceived by some of the world’s most prestigious architects, includes the work presently in progress to increase operational capacity at the city’s port, a mission entrusted to Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to revamp the city’s airport, a new Conference and Performing Arts Centre, designed by Federico Soriano, the construction of a metropolitan railway – much of it underground – designed by Sir Norman Foster, and a new footbridge crossing the river at Uribitarte, also the work of Calatrava.

 

Development of the extensive area running along the riverbank by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is also included in the plan and is the brainchild of architect César Pelli. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is the result of a unique process of collaboration, based largely on the complementary nature of resources from the Basque authorities and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Basque authorities provided the political and cultural backing, 

and the financing that enabled the Museum to be built and to operate, while the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation contributed collections of modern and contemporary art, special exhibitions, and experience in international-level museum administration and management.

 

Historical background

The history of Bilbao took a dramatic turn towards the end of the millennium. During the last decades of the 19^th Century, the Biscay state and its capital Bilbao went through an accelerated period of industrialisation. Biscay was a prosperous land even in the time of Francisco Franco, who prohibited the use of the Basque language and cancelled the autonomy of the Basque provinces opposed to his regime during the Spanish Civil War. The Bilbao of today fluctuates from a mixture of the rights regained after Franco’s death, an acute slow down in industrialisation and the aspirations of some inhabitants for autonomy in their region. This is a typical mixture of Spanish national pride and local demands for emancipation. One of my guides in Toledo told me once, “we are not a nation, we are still tribes ruled by a central government that tries to do its best.” Nevertheless, Spain is now the fastest growing nation in West Europe and part of the new wealth that the land is experiencing right now, flows to Bilbao in a quite unexpected way: architectural and cultural tourism.

 

History of the Villa – Archaeological discoveries have revealed that today’s Bilbao was inhabited in ancient times, long before the foundation of the town.

The history of the town as we know it today began in the Middle Ages as a commercial settlement and then started to develop as a town. That first settlement became a town (“Villa” in Spanish) on June 15^th 1300, by a proclamation by D. Diego Lopez de Haro V, of Biscay. In its first development it is important to emphasize the influence of the coastal Jacobean Road. The old bridge enabled pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela, to cross the Estuary at that point, bringing to the town growing affluence in economic and cultural interchange. Bilbao was also at the end of the road from Castilla to the sea and the cove through the Biscay estates; a gateway for importing foreign goods for the Castilla markets and exporting the Castilla wool to Central and Northern countries. At its proclamation, the town jurisdiction developed into the Metropolitan Bilbao of today.

 

Thus the birth and development of Bilbao was determined by its geography. The cove and the mountains are the basic components of its character and the town adapted its urban growth to that situation. The Nervion and the Durango rivers flow into the Ibaizabal River, forming a salt water cove some 14 kilometers before meeting the open sea. Bilbao began life at this specific conjunction of waters, sheltered from invaders and pirates. The tides enabled big ships, both then and at the present time, to sail over the sands at the mouth of the cove (the Abra) and to continue inland towards a secure port.

San Anton – From its first location on the left bank, known today as “Bilbao la Vieja”, the Old Bilbao, the town progressed to the right bank, spreading in a wide course. At this point construction of the fortified town began, alongside the bridge and the fortress, the site of today’s San Anton Church.

 

During the XV and XVI centuries, Bilbao became the most dynamic centre of the Biscay estates: ships, foundry, shipyards and goods, and flourishing that resulted in the granting in 1511 of its own Trade Consulate by Queen Juana .

Through the wharves of the Old City, Bilbao maintained its commercial relationships with the North European states of the Middle Ages and the Atlantic connections of modern times. The merchants of the Town created a Guild of Sailors forging close relationships with Bruges, Nantes and other maritime towns of Atlantic Europe. Trade with England followed suit and afterwards the American Colonies were added to the extensive clientele.

Thus Bilbao and the Estate enter the Golden Age of trade with the New World.

 

The sons of the town were not only merchants, but also ship builders and captains of international repute, sailing from the Baltic to the West Indies and from Ireland to the Indian Ocean. Very soon, the urban enclave was too small for an ever-growing population. The accelerated commercial development of the city necessitated expansion outside its walls. In the middle of the 15^th Century, four more streets were added to the first three of the town, all parallel to each other, giving the old part of the city the name that it has to this day of “Zazpi Kale” or “Seven Streets.” The Cathedral of Santiago dedicated to the city’s saint, was erected in place of the old convent.

 

The new Square – The city was further enlarged in the direction of the sandy ground, the Arenal, and new streets were added giving rise to the great roads of the 17^th Century, and consolidating the Old Quarter.The great boulevard was the centre of the social and economic life of Bilbao, and the Bank of Bilbao, the Arriaga Theatre and the Commerce Camera were founded in the 18^th Century. The entire area was pronounced an Artistic and Historic Complex in 1972. In 1875 the wide railroad and the narrow constructed in 1890 effectively connected the city with the rest of the country. In 1892, the University of the Compañia de Jesús was founded and Bilbao entered a period of growth and wealth deriving from the 14 kilometers of shipyards and related industries at the shore.

 

The Arsenal Bridge – The Arsenal Bridge symbolised the expansion of Bilbao in the 20^th Century, and the financial institutions, the New Stock Market and the maritime companies were situated on the other side of the cove.

 

Enlargement – The first decades of the 20^th Century were providential for Bilbao because, together with its economic growth, the cultural aspects of the city also grew. Connections with the important centres of that time, chiefly London and Paris, and expanded cultural development brought to Bilbao merchants and members of the industrial aristocracy. Something of that past splendour is still reflected in the buildings and museums of the city. After the civil war Bilbao grew at a spectacular rate, although sometimes haphazardly. People from all over the country answered the call for workers in an ever-growing industry. The city’s expansion extended beyond its first limits, climbing the nearby mountainsides and forming a co-urban expansion with neighbouring municipalities along the cove. Today this population has reached almost a million inhabitants, and today the main part of the Basque population is concentrated in this portion of Biscay territory.

 

The Suspension Bridge – At the end of the 19^th Century and beginning of the 20^th, the Bilbao cove attained its greatest modifications, under the direction of Engineer Evaristo de Churruca. Little by little the port reached towards the sea, until its present position. At the end of the 19^th century the suspension bridge, with its metallic structure, joined the two shores of the Abra River, at the point where the cove becomes sea.

 

During the 1980’s, along with the profound crisis in an industry that lost competitiveness because of obsolescence, resulting in a high rate of unemployment, the strains associated with entrance into the European Common Market, with its restructuring in every sector of production was added. This situation has confronted Bilbao with a new urban plan and more so, with an economic plan. Between 1989 and 1992, the Plan for the Revitalization of Metropolitan Bilbao was formed to define the Bilbao of the Third Millennium. The result was a new perspective of a “Bilbao, city of advanced services, in a modern industrial region, capable and competitive.” This approach reflects the conviction that industry and services are inseparable in the economic environment of the 21st Century.

 

The 1990’s – In the “Prodigious Decade” of the 1990’s the new Bilbao came to life. The closure of old factories and introduction of new areas of enterprise along with drainage of the cove, led to ecological regeneration. With deficits of almost 3 billion pesetas, the urbane face of Bilbao is changing, with groups of architects constituting a kind of international All Star team, Frank O. Gehry (Museum Guggenheim), Norman Foster (el Metro), Santiago Calatrava (Bridge and Airport), Cesar Pelli (Urbanity arrangement), Federico Soriano (Palace of Congress and the Music), Stirling & Wilford (Station Intermodal).

While Guggenheim in Spain can boast some new acquisitions and masterpieces from the New York museum’s core collection, it has had to overcome Bilbao’s isolated position to be a central institution, and has done so primarily through the innovative brilliance of its architecture.

Judging by inaugural year results, the Basque government’s decision to spend copious sums of money on a Guggenheim outpost has paid off. From October 1997 to October 1998, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao received 1.36 million visitors, three times as many as expected. Attracted by Frank O. Gehry’s spectacular building and the museum’s exhibition offerings, includihg “The Guggenheim Museums and the Art of this Century,” “China: 5,000 Years,” the Blake-Purnell collection and a Helen Frankenthaler show, visitors exceeded 9,000 per day on key Spanish holidays. Among Spain’s museums, the GMB now ranks second only to the Prado in popularity and first in membership, with 9,000 “friends” and 100 corporate patrons.

Despite the additional costs incurred in handling massive crowds, the GMB financed 67 percent of its own operations, surpassing the Guggenheim Foundation’s own estimate of 49 percent, and well above most Spanish museums. Museum visitors also generated more than $198 million in tourism revenues for the region.

The GMB definitely put the Basque Country on the vacation map. According to a Peat Marwick survey, most visitors–approximately 79 percent—travelled to Bilbao specifically to see the museum. Of those, 41 percent came from the local area, 32 percent were from the rest of Spain and 27 percent were from other countries, particularly France. The museum’s long-term success may depend in large part on the Basque Country’s political stability. And that stability is still uncertain.

 

The Foundation And Thomas Krens

For some time, the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation looked for a place to build its new museum. After a disappointment in Venice where the promise of premises fell through, Bilbao arose as the perfect match: a win-win situation.

Thomas Krens is the Guggenheim’s director, and father of the actual expansion plans of the museums. He made one of the presentations of the GBM at the Venice Biennale of 1995, where he expounded on his knowledge of post-modern art language, stating that Gehry creation is “…free form, almost Bauhaus with a Gaudiesque dimension”[1].

The Solomon Guggenheim Foundation is engaged in a campaign to raise funds for the construction of the new museum by the Hudson in New York City. The architect appointed to plan the building is no other than…Frank Gehry. The project will be located on three piers at the foot of Wall Street and will include exhibition and office space, shops, restaurants and a 1200-seat theatre. It is expected to cost almost $700 million US Dollars and will take about five years to complete. The big building, if built according to Gehry’s proposal, will be a 40-story complex and twice the size of the GBM.

There is no doubt that the retrospective exhibition of Gehry’s projects held in Guggenheim Museum at this time (Summer 2001) is part of that campaign.

Krens is now pushing the boundaries of his map outside Europe and the USA, this time to South America, where, along with Gehry, in November 2000 he researched four cities in Brazil as possible locations for his branches.

In early 1991, the Basque administration was planning to convert the Alhondiga, a former wine-storage warehouse, into a cultural facility. Built early in the century, the Alhondiga was one of the first pre-cast concrete structures built in Spain, but it is now a near ruin. 28,000 square meters in area, it covers an entire block along Bilbao’s Alameda de Recalde, an avenue running towards the Nervion River. Financial resources had been allotted towards its reconstruction, and an architectural model existed by the time Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, saw the building on his first trip to Bilbao in April 9,1991. He recalled: ”They planned to leave the exterior skirt, you might call it, which was a kind of fenestrated medieval castle, and just destroy the whole interior of the building.”’ A high glass box, roughly square, would fit inside the remaining exterior.

 

Krens was accompanied by Carmen Gimenez, the Guggenheim’s Curator of Twentieth Century Art and the former Director of National Exhibitions for the Government of Spain. In the six months prior to their arrival in Bilbao, she had introduced him to a small group he characterized as ”influential advisors,” including a Basque representative. Several lunches and dinners took place in Madrid, at which Krens presented his concept of an ”internationally expanding Guggenheim.” At the time plans were in place for a new Guggenheim museum to be built in Salzburg, Austria, designed by the Austrian architect Hans Hollein, which would be partly embedded into a mountainous site. Because this proposal was stalled, Krens was more receptive to the Basque Administration’s proposal to bring in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation as a partner in their museum project.

One can think of reasons why the Basque group would want the Guggenheim as a partner. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, Bilbao had been a bustling industrial and mercantile community, but in recent times, in the face of recession, it has been in the difficult position of making a transition to high-service industries. Major resources have been devoted to urban renewal: The airport, undergoing expansion, will have a new terminal designed by the Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava; a new control tower by the same architect is already completed, as is a suspension bridge for pedestrians over the Nervion River. While the Intermodal Station Project, started a decade ago by the firm of James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates, is yet to be built, the first phase of the subway designed by the British architect Sir Norman Foster is finished. Both projects not only will facilitate travel, but will engender new office spaces, public plazas, and green areas in the city. The conversion of the abandoned Alhondiga, a remnant of early twentieth-century industrialism, into a cultural facility for the exhibition of contemporary art, would fit within the plans of upgrading the city. But the Basques did not have an internationally renowned collection to put on view in the new museum, nor did they have the expertise to run it. It was there that the Guggenheim Foundation could fulfil a vital role.

Krens’s choice was a natural one. In October l988, he had engaged Frank O. Gehry and Associates; Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown; and other architects to develop a master plan and feasibility study for the conversion of the former Sprague Technologies, a twenty-eight- building factory with rough interior spaces in North Adams, Massachusetts – once a thriving mill town, but today a depressed area – into the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). The complex, which opened in 1998, was intended to be the world’s largest museum of contemporary art and architecture. Although its focus has changed to some extent, and its governing body is entirely independent, MASS MoCA is another element in Krens’s vision of an extended Guggenheim.

 

On May 20, 1991, Gehry came to Bilbao and took a good look. His immediate reaction, along lines similar to Krens’, was that the Alhondiga was an unworkable proposition for a museum. He felt that it might be better to refurbish the warehouse as a hotel with places to shop, while retaining the existing structure. Tearing down the exterior would destroy the fabric of that particular area of the city; preserving the outer shell for the new building would result in a discord of scale and style. ”My advice was to move the Museum somewhere else,” Gehry recollected in an interview in 1995. When questioned by the Basques as to which location he would pick, he recalled responding, ”’By the river’… because they had been telling me all day that the river is being redeveloped…. I liked the site because it went under the bridge.” Asked in the interview if he actually decided the site of the competition, he replied, ”That is correct. It is near the Bellas Artes School, and we started to speculate on a potential connection.”’

The Architect

In the early 1970’s, Frank Gehry, in a very paradoxical manner, witnessed the discourse between anti-museum artists who tried to make art outside the museum walls. These artists followed two main initiatives; one to remove art from its pedestal, its frame and the wall and, two, to build very collapsible and improvised architectural monuments. They experimented as a way of communication between themselves and others and often these unfinished works found their way into museums and galleries as installations. The Venice group was formed by artists like Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Tony Berlant, Moses and Doug Wheeler. Moses and Bell played with rooms in their homes and Bengston used to reconstruct his studio time and again, taking apart recycled materials of the aeronautic industry. Gehry took that new language several steps further and built with recycled materials or with non-standard materials, “real buildings.” His search was after a form that didn’t blend into the patterns of a Euclidian geometry, but into shapes and forms that reflected illusions of energy. From this search that was maintained by him and by the deconstructionists in Europe and Japan at the same time, Gehry wanted to open the closed form, and find a new logic for the closed circuits of architecture.

This is the period when the concept of big in sculpture received a boost, when artists, mostly of the Minimalist persuasion, turned against clean, clinical white-box environment of established museums and galleries to push art beyond commercial boundaries. But then, the Establishment started to think big too. It is the kind of perpetual battle between projectile and armor never ending and keeping the wheels turning.

 

Gehry was always part of both the artistic and architectural communities. His former studies in art previous to the school of architecture, instilled in him the appreciation for free forms that are not necessarily the response to a material need, feeding his belief that “painting is the highest human art[2].” No surprise therefore, that his closest friends in Venice and afterwards in New York, were textural sculptors who use materials in non-conventional ways, building structures almost architectural in nature. Following this principle of free forms, imaginative use of materials and colossal dimensions, Gehry often joined forces with his friends Serra, as in the Manhattan Bridge and with Serra and Van Bruggen and Oldenburg in the Chiat/Day building. So it is no surprise that so many spaces of the Bilbao Guggenheim are so suitable for art works the size of ships or houses.

Gehry has a history of designing spaces for today’s art. He left unfinished and in a raw state an experimental annex to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Temporary Contemporary, now known as the Geffen contemporary. Once a city warehouse and service garage in the Little Tokyo section, Gehry remodeled it to recall the spirit of artists’ studios. Since its opening, the museum has presented a wide range of large-scale installations, including the work of Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin and Barbara Kruger. In 1998 there was an exhibition of Serra’s works at this museum, one of them, “58 x 64 x 70” is made of six identical blocks of steel, equally spaced 1 meter apart, forming two parallel rows along a central axis. Each block weighs 37 tons. After the Geffen show, the work went on to fill a gallery the size of a football field at … the Guggenheim in Bilbao. This trend, so well understood by Gehry and other contemporary architects of art museums who create large spaces in galleries and museums, presented a challenge for artists to fill.

 

For the time being nobody wanted to deal with the question: Is this sustainable over the long term? What are you left with if things shift?

But Gehry is much more than a nonconformist searching for the right shape. He is engaged in what encouraged Sir Isaac Newton to discover calculus; he is a genius making his own language to build his credo. There is no place in Gehry’s architectural vocabulary for conventional grids or obsolete drawing instruments. He first builds small scale buildings, sometimes dozen of models and only after he explores them, often even assembling two models of different buildings or kicking a model to experience a new shape, he sends them to be 3D scanned and subsequently computed. This mix, between free form emerging from a brain nurtured in art as well as architecture and the state-of-the art engineered solutions, makes Gehry’s buildings a challenge to the viewer as well as the user. This method of working is so natural to him, that he believed all architects work in the same way.[3]

 

In an era where engineers can build anything architects can design, the “form vs. function” debate re-emerges. It is not the aim of this work to deal with this important question, but to locate where, in my opinion, Gehry is situated.

Analysing the shape of the most important buildings he designed in the 1990’s, it is possible to ascertain that the external shape of the structure is important to the degree that reasonably establishes he is not just an echo of the function of that construction.

 

Is quite common to start Gehry’s professional biography with the metamorphosis of his own house in Santa Monica, California. But this house only has a retrospective importance. Without all further projects, who would notice a work where what occurred was the amplification of a small house using unusual forms and materials? The significance lies in that this house was part of a state of mind and the realization that there is no such thing as high and low grade materials in contemporary architecture.

 

Gehry is a son of globalisation, far from the USA, who designs in Paris, Prague, Weil am Rhein, Kobe, Barcelona and is presently searching with Thomas Krens for a place for Guggenheim Museum in Brazil. He is an American in the World, flamboyant, expensive and technical. His own semantic and semiological images are closer to shapes than to function: “Ginger and Fred”, “blade”, “ship”, “flower” are verbal representations of buildings or part of buildings in Gehry’s own words.

His aesthetical statement in regard to the new Experience Music Project (EMP) was to slice up an electric guitar and to use the parts as key shapes in his design. The EMP, a new Seattle museum that documents and celebrates the history of rock `n’ roll, owes its unconventional design to a guitar — and to a sophisticated computer software program. While the shape of the musical instrument inspired the building, advanced technology was required to implement the concept. The concept for EMP originated in the early 1990s, when Allen started collecting memorabilia of the late Seattle rock star Jimi Hendrix. He and his sister, Jody Allen Patton, expanded on the original idea for a modest facility that would highlight a single performer. The culmination is an interactive, 140,000-sq.-ft. museum that features interactive exhibits.

This time no titanium was used EMP’s exterior skin consists of about 20,000 pieces of trapezoidal-shaped metal sheets, fabricated by Kansas City, Mo.-based A. Zahner Co. The building’s 3,180 panels, which vary in size from 2 feet by 4 feet to 8 feet by 15 feet, typically consist of five to seven individual pieces. None are identical. EMP’s exterior has 120,000 square feet of stainless steel (with three finishes: gold glass bead, purple mirror and angel hair), and 65,000 square feet of red- and blue-painted aluminium.

The unusual nature of EMP’s design also dictated modifications to many standard construction practices. For example, determining measurements from a reference point such as a wall, which works when a structure is plumb, was a more complicated process. It was necessary to have surveyors plot building points. “That was the cerebral link from the design to the field,” Winn said. Building team members coined such descriptive terms as “Madonna wall,” “potato chip,” “snake wall,” and “donkey canopy” as shorthand for identifying particular areas of the project.

 

The influence of Bilbao Museum is far beyond its physical dimensions. It is not the largest museum of art built recently, and is not even the biggest project in Bilbao (Calatrava’s city airport is bigger by far), but it became the pinnacle of his career to date.

 

Hans Hollein said in a conference held in Tel Aviv in 2000 in memory of Bruno Zevi, that “old architects are the best architects,” half as a joke, but half true to life. Gehry, who was a member of the panel at that conference, could only agree with the statement. Old architects are indeed erecting amazing buildings. Pei, Johnson, Hollein are all well over 75. And anyway, one of the questions of the 21st Century is “how much old is old?” Gehry who plays ice-hockey regularly (his office has his own league team) and practices martial arts, is part of that old-new generation that defies the general belief that revolutionary in design is young. Revolutionary in design is good.

Gehry was almost 70 years old when he started to work on the Bilbao’s project. Today, that titanium covered structure represents for many people a kind of Tour Eiffel of Contemporary times, strange forms, ultimate technology and the icon of a city, and as for the architect, he already has a place in immortality.

Gehry adopted at an early stage in his professional life a line which was neither perpendicular nor horizontal. This kind of geometry that is not post-modern in the sense of citations and historical clues, is one of the elements that make his work so appealing. Jealously guarding the aesthetic principles he acquired from his early beginnings at art school, Gehry invented a code that in fact is quite easy to read on several levels. His buildings are constructed from the outside towards the inside, and are an explosion of forms, without falling into the chaotic trap of some deconstructionist architects.

The images emerging from the forms he creates are a trigger to imagination, frequently fed by Gehry himself. He is the one who coined the name “Ginger and Fred” for his Prague building, and the one who talks about flowers and faces in Bilbao’s Guggenheim, a place where every one sees a huge ship sailing the Nervion. Unlike Eisenman or Venturi, he doesn’t have a theory using his own buildings as examples, and rather explains them afterwards.

 

The Building

The use of old materials in a new form, as in the tower built of a thin eggshell of stone (barely 3 cm thick) with a skeleton of steel and using new and unexpected materials (wall cover of titanium) all contribute to perfection in details. Perhaps typified as Post-Modern in the approach to the materials, Hi-Tech in the use of them and Neo-Gaudiesque in his forms, this example of Gehry’s work, places him nearer to the organic forms of Art Nouveau in the beginning of the century and further from the Late Modernism of the end of the century. In the midst of international fanfare in honour of that creation, a sense of reality is achieved because the Museum is already dealing with discolouration of the titanium plaques attacked by Bilbao’s air pollution opening the not unexpected mutual accusations between builders, material suppliers

and the architect.

In a restricted competition, Gehry’s project was selected over projects presented by Arata Isozaki and Coop Himmelblau.. At a time of media hype, it has often been called the building of the century, leaving barely two years for a competitor. This acclaim might stem from its presence, both in the city and mountain landscape. Le Corbusier’s pilgrimage church at Ronchamp and Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House achieved similar notoriety in the sixties and seventies because they, too, were made from curved and unusual shapes, but particularly because they took command of their landscapes with similar power. The incredible urban presence has led to overstated metaphors rolling off the press: an explosion of light, a starburst of energy, unstoppable white lava, overlapping waves, fish thrashing about, a Constructivist artichoke or, most ecstatic of all, a shiny sequined swimmer about to burst out of her bathing suit. Metaphors are a ’carrying over’ from one idea to another, a transgression, a metamorphosis of categories and they go to the heart of the erotic and ecstatic. As we have seen, Ecstatic Architecture typically crosses boundaries, merges categories and concentrates on itself – its own internal world. ‘Bilbaoism’ is a term used by Jencks to describe both the extreme emphasis on architecture about itself and the extremity of responses to this, but it is worth focusing on the positive reactions for a moment because they are so unusual in their unanimity, particularly among architects. They, like all professionals, are usually a jealous lot. At the opening of the museum in October 1997, and before, I was struck by how many architects of different persuasions had made the trip to Bilbao and were profoundly impressed. One, Eric Moss, who has developed his own highly expressive system, said the building was so good that it blocked off this way forward: improvement along this avenue seemed impossible. Architects respond implicitly to the extreme self-reference that works, architecture squared.

 

Almost everyone is struck by the way the museum building captures and uses the site. Frank Gehry actually chose the exposed position, at a slight curve in the Nervion River; a difficult point because it was the junction between opposite urban pressures: disused naval docks, railroad yards, a highway bridge with four lanes of traffic, the medieval ruins of the city and its heavy, nineteenth-century Classicism. Above, the large hills flow down to what had once been a muddle, and it must have been these visual lines, and the heterogeneity itself, which led Gehry to the choice of location. In any case, placing the building where he did gave it the pivotal position in the city and countryside, just like placing the queen in the centre of a chessboard. No other building in Bilbao can surpass this position; it is the final move in the end-game of the city. When one looks down on Gehry’s silvery eruptions glowing against the dark masonry background of Bilbao, one is reminded of Chartres Cathedral dominating the landscape and city, or the palazzo publico commanding the piazza in Siena. The twentieth century has produced many failed monuments, and anti-monuments such as skyscrapers, and this is one of the first, recent urban monuments to be convincing. Coincidentally, it also epitomizes a trend that has been underway for thirty years – the museum as cathedral. When the new Guggenheim is seen either from the surrounding hills, or from between the canyon walls of the nineteenth-century classical city, it appears like a steel-clad Notre Dame, the anchor to the whole urban fabric – its focus, the place to be, the heart of downtown. The fact that art is worshipped inside, and that it is by such as Richard Serra, Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons, may offend some and not a few Basques, who wonder why they should pay to house the lend-lease programme of New York’s Guggenheim Museum. But these questions of art replacing religion and imperial art of America dominating the local culture are becoming marginal as the citizens begin to see the trade-off work. They have one of the great monuments of the 1990s which might give Bilbao a European presence, regenerate a declining industrial city and, along with other buildings by important architects such as Foster and Calatrava, give the city new confidence. This is why the bargain was made with the Guggenheim in the first place. Crudely put, it was a gamble to see if culture could replace ship-

building; art and leisure industries take the place of rust-belt manufacture, an experiment which has been tried in other cities with mixed results. It will take three or four years to see if this experiment works. As for the art. chosen for the opening exhibit, some of it is bombastic and inflated, especially Lawrence Wiener’s much expanded REDUCED, which climbs twenty-five feet up a wall. But the new Guggenheim answers a contemporary problem. However inadequate art is as a religion, however much artists and architects object to the monument, the large museum is perhaps the best public focus we have found this century. It may not provide a true or complete public realm, but it is the only one we have been able to invest with the prestige, money, and creativity of the old great monuments.

 

Yet there is an entirely different reason for the new Guggenheim’s importance: its key place in an emergent tradition. Along with Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin and Peter Eisenman’s school of architecture in Cincinnati, it is a building which confirms the new paradigm of what could be called Complexity Architecture, or Non-linear Architecture (after the new sciences of complexity and non-linearity). This confirmation of a change is the reason it is so interesting to the architectural profession. It extends ideas which are at the edge of knowledge, and knowledge, as the Bible states, can be erotic, dangerous and forbidden – a sin. The idea that has attracted the attention of both architects and the public is the notion that buildings can get closer to nature in its infinite variety, become less boring, less predictable, more dynamic – at little extra cost. One of the leading sciences of complexity was formulated by Benoit Mandelbrot in The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1977). Here he argues that nature is not made, as most Westerners from Plato to Cezanne and Modern architects believed, from absolute geometric figures – the cone, sphere and cylinder. These are exceptions, not the prevalent underlying patterns. The sun, planetary rotation and the near straight line of a bullet were the few things that exhibited Platonic form and, although architecture has been based on primary shapes since the Egyptians first started with pyramids and squares, nature is not normally Euclidean. The tree, the fern, the lightning bolt, the coastline of Scotland – to cite Mandelbrot’s favourites.

 

Compared to Meier’s idealized world in Getty’s Centre at Los Angeles, California, the Guggenheim looks lusty and carnal, all torsos and thighs. The building seems to push against the hillsides of Bilbao’s river valley, even as its titanium curves form a shining focus in the cityscape. Close up, the curvilinear forms model light and massage the space immediately adjacent to the building, titillating the senses of the viewer and setting up expectations of revelation inside. The fountain of forms that shoots up over the entry hastens the pulse of anyone approaching its doors, persuading visitors to overlook the fact that much of the building, particularly on the city side, is right-angled and boxy. Like the Getty, the Guggenheim, with the significant exception of a handful of free-form galleries, geometrically conventional rooms inside, and the curvilinear shapes outside has mostly a facade with limited gallery impact. Though Gehry has developed the atrium sculpturally, it simply amounts to an interior facade quasi-independent of the galleries beyond. Curiously, however, the memory of the animated facades persists beyond the front doors, so that visitors see the Guggenheim interiors as though through a mental montage built up during their promenade. The exterior is so powerful that it puts visitors into a state that lasts longer than the visit. To really understand the building requires several return trips: the senses have to calm down.

 

The architectural language Gehry uses is really not without modern precedent if we think of Boccioni’s spatial theories, and of certain Russians like Vladimir Krinsky and Nikolai Ladovsky or of German Expressionist schemes like Hermann Finsterlin’s. But what differs from Boccioni is scale, and what differs from Krinsky, Ladovsky and Finsterlin is that Gehry constructed the vision. This is architecture that, with a few exceptions such as Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, has seldom been built in our times, and it is precisely the phenomenon of physically experiencing the Guggenheim that makes it so historically significant. Visitors near the building might be said to “feel into” the churning forms empathically, understanding with their inner ear a building that makes their bodies think. The physicality of this sensuous building encourages other ways of understanding besides reason, and calls on intuition. This is not an objective building presenting art in a cool Newtonian context, but an auratic space very much in the tradition favored by the Guggenheim’s first director, Hilla Rebay, who wanted people to see Kandinskys in upholstered surroundings with music and incense burning. The environment conditions the eye and mind largely through the senses.

The well-kept little secret of the Guggenheim that is largely camouflaged from the outside is a classical wing of conventional galleries intended for the modern collection — for the dead artists, says Gehry, who can’t fight back when put in more adventuresome spaces. Three galleries on each floor are arranged progressively, en suite, with tall centred light wells cut through the top floor to channel light from skylights above. These wells effectively create smaller spaces within otherwise enormous galleries, and the resulting intimacy serves the mostly pre-war art well. The spaces have a rare calm. The scale of the rooms is right for the art; the paintings read beautifully. Yet it is disappointing that a building which advertises innovation so conspicuously outside resorts to spatial concepts for hanging art that Frank Lloyd Wright already decried when he started designing the Fifth Avenue Guggenheim in the 1940s. Most of the other galleries in the Bilbao Guggenheim are also right-angled boxes, though they do not belong to the suite of so-called classical galleries. Though they are in the minority, there are several curvilinear galleries that do express the outside forms, and explore possibilities for displaying contemporary art in something other than the standard white cube. Two non-standard galleries start to make the point. Jenny Holzer adapted her piece within a tall segment of a compound curve, words rising and falling in a geometrically inexplicable void from the rear of her thin electronic word columns. The context spatializes the piece, and the piece reveals the space. On an upper floor, the walls of the gallery devoted to Bruce Nauman swell and flow like an emanation up to a skylight that bathes the chamber in light. Long, curved walls feather and bounce the light: Nauman’s pieces stand out very clearly in the mobile and luminous space. The Anselm Kiefer gallery, which is also high, perhaps has the greatest potential for proving the validity of non-orthogonal galleries, except that a high, vertical wall was built that spoils an otherwise graceful curve that could have embraced the paintings.

 

The largest gallery — called the “boat” and reputedly longer than a football field — is also one of the curvilinear galleries, and has emerged as a problem space, not necessarily because of its size or shape, but because of how poorly it shows the art whose very bigness supposedly justifies enormous interior scale. The premise that big art needs big space is arguable. Much of the art of the last several decades which challenges the dimensions of loft-size galleries needs the dimension of a loft to retain that sense of challenge: in a loft viewers are kept relatively close to large canvases so that the space in the canvas itself becomes the environment. This is not the case in the Bilbao Guggenheim, where the width of the boat gallery allows viewers to stand well outside the visual pull of, for example, the Warhols and Rosenquists. (It might also be said that small works do not necessarily need small spaces.)

A second problem is the length of the “boat” gallery, as both the sculptures and paintings, seen from either end, pile up on top of each other visually. Because the paintings are approached from one end rather than frontally, the thinness of their edges makes them look trivial, despite their monumental proportions. This is not an architectural mistake so much as a curatorial oversight; it could easily be remedied by some well-placed walls subdividing the space to afford frontal approaches. Spaces such as this call for curators with a talent for handling not only wall surface but interior volumes.

The vastness of some of the galleries creates other awkward dimensional problems. Very large undivided galleries offer a wide field of vision that takes in entire walls of paintings (along with the ceiling and all the lighting hardware). The geometry of this wide optical cone militates for fewer, larger paintings or monographic exhibits with similar, compatible works; otherwise the comprehensive view creates discord. The cone of vision is high as well as wide, which means the ceilings should extend beyond the height the works normally demand, to keep from oppressing space when seen at a distance. The fact that a gallery is bigger doesn’t mean it can handle more art. These wide-angle spaces potentially compromise the fragile ecosystem of viewing. Again, intermediary walls could easily re-proportion galleries, scale down the angle of vision, and thin out the discordant juxtapositions. Without such walls, the galleries that work best are those where Gehry lifts the ceiling. In a gallery on the third floor featuring Julian Schnabel. among others, Gehry doubles the height with a clerestory box altering a horizontal line that would otherwise seem low because of the lateral expansiveness of the room.

 

 Inside the museum

To synchronise with the museum’s gigantic proportions, it was necessary to attach to it several works that it would be unthinkable to exhibit in any other Guggenheim museum. Serra’s iron snake, Jenny Holzer neon signs and Jeff Koons puppy are examples of the need for quantity and size, as well as quality in the art exhibited.

 

In the same tradition of Wright’s Guggenheim in New York, the exhibition of art in the Museum is difficult, and despite the declaration of Gehry that Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t like art and therefore it is hard to exhibit art at his New York spiral, his own building is especially only conducive to a group of artist friends invited to exhibit there. Oldenburg, Serra and Rauschenberg feel very comfortable in spaces tailored for them by Gehry, while artists with less monumental works can hardly find themselves in volumes and walls that are more reminiscent of a contemporary Daedalus than spaces and walls destined to show art.

 

Conclusions

There is a tendency in books and articles to treat Gehry and the museum building as a fact of life. There is a nebulous consensus that he should be regarded as the leader of the new language of architecture.

With the perspective that time gives, next judgements of any kind will be based on accurate information rather than the vagaries of contemporary criticism. He is a figure of unusual historical dimensions who need to be seen as one of those rare individuals who have altered the assumptions of their art in basic ways. The architecture symbolism is not any more the same. As the turning point the architecture took with Le Corbusier theoretical and practical statements, here again we met a milestone. In a gigantic game where big money, power of decision and vision is represented by the Guggenheim Foundation, determination and clarividence by the town of Bilbao and creativity by the architect, we as public are presented with a practical piece of art. One we can use, relate and enjoy.

Bilbao has lately become a pilgrimage town. The word is out that miracles still occur, and that a major one has happened here. People have been flocking to Bilbao for nearly two years before his official opening, just to watch the building’s skeleton take shape. ”Have you been to Bilbao?” In architectural circles, that question has acquired the status of a shibboleth. Have you seen the light? Have you seen the future? Does it work? Does it play?

The miracle taking place here,in long tradition of Catholicism, however, is not Gehry’s building, wondrous as it is. The miraculous occurrence is the extravagant optimism that enters into the outlook of those who have made the pilgrimage

Gehry’s impact has been on consciousness, that is to say, not just particular parcels of land. And in the post-industrial city, it may no longer be possible to divorce consciousness from material reality. What was once the radical outlook of Surrealism has become part of the logic of everyday life. Ideas, images and illusions now occupy the places once held by sweaters, ball bearings and vacuum tubes.

You can go in, and you can come out. The interplay between in and out has been a recurring theme of architecture for the past century. The open floor plan of Frank Lloyd Wright. The primary colors and forms of Theo van Doesburg. The glass-curtain walls of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Twentieth-century architecture has unfolded as a series of variations on the relationship between the interior and exterior of buildings, bodies, minds — between public and private realms. Gehry extends this tradition into an era when communications technology is further shifting the boundaries between public and private space, and when an awareness of psychology has permeated and transformed the dynamics of public and private life. But his means of extending that tradition are not the same as those of the classical modernists. Instead of trying to further reduce architectural form to the bare minimum, he has gone deeper into the psychological space where images are formed and further out into the city that helps to shape them.

 

[1] Lister, D. (1995, Autumn, Volume 8, Number 3) The Global Sell Modern Painters. London, pp. 50-51.

[2]           Video

[3]           “I live under the illusion that I work as all architects do, and get surprised that they don’t work like me”. Frank Gehry in video.