Beauty And The Industrial City
Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim/Bilbao.
Not since the Sidney Opera House, has a building achieved more recognition and admiration than the new Guggenheim art museum in Bilbao (1997). Many have visited it, and most people have heard about it, yet few buildings have been so basically misinterpreted as Gehry’s artistic exhibition building
Politicians are probably those in society that have displayed the greatest misunderstanding of this popular building. They have the naive impression that if the public authorities want to cultivate their image architecturally, it is SIMPLY a question of commissioning an international celebrity to create a masterpiece when needed. If politicians take the time to investigate what actually happened in the case of the Guggenheim Museum, they would discover that a number of fortunate circumstances proved to be a great advantage to Bilbao’s bankrupt industrial city. They also might realize that a lucky coincidence does not necessarily repeat itself by political demand.
An abbreviated version of the background story is that the Guggenheim Museum committee had spent some time looking for a European counterpart to its famous New York collection. The first choice was Venice, which is already visited by 15 million tourists annually - and where the museum is already represented by a small collection. Unfortunately, the Italian authorities proved to be so unforgivably slow to deal with, that the second choice of Salzburg came into consideration. Here, architect Hans Hollein produced his famous proposal of building the museum as a skylit, stepped fissure in the mountainside between the city’s upper core, and the lower lying suburban areas.
For a number of reasons, the city of music had to be dismissed, and quite by chance, the museum director accepted an invitation from beleaguered Bilbao, to investigate the possibility of a location in the Basque country together with architect Frank Gehry. This ended by asking three architects, with short notice and a few weeks of sketching, to produce proposals - a competition that Gehry won. Presumably, because he had already scouted the site more than his competitors. The rest of the story is common knowledge: Gehry acquired a shipment of sheet titanium at a bargain price from Russia. Then, at full speed he did what he is best at: creating a sculptural work model, which when realized at full scale was a masterpiece.
The art museum is built on a former container and storage site along the polluted Nervion river, framed by not very charming building areas on both sides of the hilly river edges. From the city on the west side of the river, visitors are met by an arrival plateau with Jeff Koon’s flower-clad sculpture “puppy.” From the entrance plaza, there is access to a café and bookshop, while the museum’s main entrance lies one story lower at the bottom of a stairway fissure between the museum’s exhibition wings.
The museum has three main floors, the largest being the lower level with the entrance, and the impressive central atrium, 50 meters high, which culminates at the roof in four skylights, and from where the wings spread explosively in all directions. The longest wing (for temporary exhibitions) stretches toward south in under a large road bridge - La Salve - to shoot upward on the other side as an observation tower. It is this long building mass with its scalelike titanium sheathing that gives the fishlike associations. Actually, the museum appears more like a conglomerate of concave and convex forms in a sculptural continuity around an inner lobby space.
Functionally, the tall, bright atrium space offers both an overview of, and access to, the building’s various wings and exhibitions, There are also story-high windows facing both the city and the river on the opposite side of the room. It is especially the river side that Gehry has cultivated. Here, there is an umbrella-like baldachin, supported by a single concrete column, over a spectacular scenic terrace. From here there is access to other viewing and sun terraces between the river and the artificial pools along the “tail” of the museum. Generally speaking, the exhibition spaces are characterized by artificial lighting, and their non-rectangular spacial geometry is experienced as a surprisingly anonymous or neutral framework for the exhibited art.
Seen from a Danish attitude about materials, the museum appears somewhat disappointing with centimeter-thin stone and plasterboard panels on a curved, steel framework. The outer titanium cladding is also mounted on steel ribs, which are exact replicas of Gehry’s tiny work models. It is important to emphasize that the architectural design was not based on computer design or digital reproductions, but traditional cardboard and wood models were approved by Gehry and then scanned into the Airbus program Cattia for the ensuing digital project work. This computer program was also used during the building work to determine the spatial location of the building’s outer framework.
The titanium cladding, as a material, is a somewhat rough approach to the museum’s double-curved facades, as the individual panels have folded edges that cause the “scales” to “wrinkle” like tin paper, while they are pressed in the best possible fashion to fit their spatial positions. This rough approach and the wrinkled surface of the cladding turns out to be a textural advantage, in that this extremely shiny metal manages to capture even the slightest variations in light like the gilded onion-cupolas on a Russian orthodox church. This play of light and the constant variations on the facades of the museum offer a source of visual fascination throughout the day. While the location along a reflecting river - surrounded by one of the industrialized world’s ugliest urban landscapes - places the building in an even greater architectural relief.
When all is said and done, the museum in Balboa can also be considered to be Gehry’s most successful design to date in the area of spatial organization, which he is constantly improving and has pursued for many years. The question if the building really “resembles” a fish is not so important. However, the architectural perspective in the Bilbao building goes as far as an urban development in the form of a wavy roof perforated by windows and skylights where needed. On the other hand, Gehry’s architecture goes further than being a singular, ultimate masterpiece. He has given us the recipe for the city of the future, where “art” transcends the site and transport corridor framework.
On the basis of the general enthusiasm about the Bilbao museum’s architecture, it is a wonder that cubism is still more popular than the double-curved forms at architectural offices and schools. Considering how much computer modeling has simplified and reduced the costs of creating double-curved formwork - and thus building elements - and that Greg Lynn in his manifest: "Animate form" convincingly pleads the case of double-curved architecture as the architectural ideal of the future, Gehry deserves even more to be credited for his artistic ability in anticipating this development.
Flemming Skude
FACTS:
The museum opened in October 1997 and has become so great an attraction in Bilbao, that the city is about to establish a docking area for large cruise ships at the mouth of the river.
