How Frank Gehry (RIP) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Changed Architecture
It felt, for quite some time there, like the age of Frank Gehry would never end. But now that the latest defining figure of American architecture — or technically, Canadian-American architecture — has died at the age of 96, the time has come to ask when, exactly, his age began. Or rather, with which building: Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles? The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris? The radical renovation of his own humble Santa Monica home often cited at the origin point of the metallic, deliberately incongruous, often nearly alien aesthetic now recognized around the world? According to the B1M video above, it is to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao we must look to if we wish to understand the architecture of Frank Gehry — and much else besides.
The Guggenheim Bilbao was a challenging project when it was first conceived in the early nineteen-nineties, but then, Bilbao was a challenged setting. Once a prosperous port city, the Basque metropolis had fallen on hard times indeed, rapidly deindustrializing without much in the way of alternative appeal. Bilbao’s slight history with tourism went back to the mid-nineteenth century, but for many Spaniards, the prospect of turning the place into an international destination seemed remote at best. Still, an ambitious development plan was devised involving new infrastructure, including the city’s first metro system, centered around a branch of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
With its original Fifth Avenue location designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (Gehry’s predecessor in the cultural role of the one architect, or “starchitect,” of whom everyone has heard), that institution had a certain degree of experience with daring building designs. Familiar though the look of its gleaming sculptural curves may be today, actually constructing their non-Euclidean geometric forms in reality required technologies never before widely employed in architecture, including the early 3D-modeling system CATIA (this video’s sponsor, incidentally). Nor was the search for the right exterior texture to reflect Bilbao’s distinctively cloudy skies especially straightforward, but it did benefit from good timing: Gehry determined that titanium could do the job, whereupon the mass decommissioning of Soviet submarines happened to dump a great deal of that material on the market.
In these technological, political, and economic ways, the Guggenheim Bilbao was a product of its time. As it happened, it and the associated redevelopments did, in fact, breathe new life into the city, which has inspired a decades-long “Bilbao effect” on projects around the world with similar goals, some of them also featuring Gehry-designed cultural institutions. As the B1M host Fred Mills puts it, “Telling a story like this really is like reading out a list of things that we, today, take for granted: the idea that a museum could be an international tourist attraction, the technology, the 3D design.” And, like most architects, Gehry is survived by not just his built legacy, but also a series of projects not yet complete — including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, scheduled to open its doors next year.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.