The museum, not quite finished, is shaping up to be a masterpiece, the finest building yet by the man who is arguably America’s greatest architect. Ironically, it’s in this fairly remote European city, while construction on Gehry’s biggest U.S. commission, the Disney Concert Hall in his hometown of Los Angeles, has been stalled for years. Though the Guggenheim Bilbao–a joint venture of the New York-based museum and the Basque government–won’t open to the public until next summer, the building has already drawn a slew of visitors, from artists such as Julian Schnabel to the King of Spain. Philip Johnson, at 90 still architecture’s most vocal booster, has proclaimed the museum the greatest building of this generation.
That sort of response is what the Basque government is counting on. The $100 million museum is a cornerstone of a $1.5 billion development plan intended to put the backwater city of Bilbao on the economic and cultural map of the new Europe. With a metropolitan area of 1 million people, it’s been Spain’s smoggy, unglamorous capital of steelmaking, shipbuilding and banking. Now, besides Gehry, an international roster of big-shot architects are working there, among them Santiago Calatrava, who is building a bridge across the river and a new air terminal, and Norman Foster, who’s designed a subway whose entrances look like huge shrimp shells left on the pavement.
In 1991, Basque officials came to the Guggenheim in New York with the idea for the museum: the Guggenheim would help build it, run it and lend from its collection of 20th-century masters and contemporary art; Basque tax money would pay for it. The Guggenheim’s ambitious director Thomas Krens was skeptical about Bilbao at first but was won over. The Guggenheim invited Gehry, the Austrian firm Coop Himmelblau and the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki to come up with schemes. A jury chose Gehry’s design.
In his rumpled corduroys and trench coat, Gehry is the Columbo of architects, seemingly nonchalant but noodling obsessively over every form, figuring out brilliantly what the story is. With the Bilbao museum, the story is the city–how to make his eye-popping asymmetrical design fit into a dour bourgeois place. Gehry should be given more credit for paying attention to urban settings: here, for all its wildness, his building weaves into the existing fabric and electrifies it. The scale is enormous–256,000 square feet–and it’s nearly twice as tall and long as Paris’s Pompidou Center, but it feels light, not looming. A long boat-form hugs the river; a center chunk soars skyward. A piece of “the boat” ducks under an existing six-lane suspension bridge; another section of the building straddles the old railroad tracks. The quay, once abandoned to warehouses and freight cars, has come to life, with a long outside staircase (“The Fred-and-Ginger stairway,” Gehry calls it) swooping down to the water.
Gehry is showing a visitor around inside. When you think “Guggenheim,” you think Frank Lloyd Wright, and the towering central atrium in Bilbao–at 165 feet, half again the height of Wright’s New York spiral–seems to say “Take that!” to the master. It is full of light, soaring spaces and is criss-crossed by catwalks, with three levels of galleries spinning off it. “The whole idea here was Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,’ to make a visionary city,” says Gehry. Wright’s museum is a tough place to show big works of contemporary art. Gehry’s galleries–several will be dedicated to the work of a single artist such as Francesco Clemente–are oddball shapes softened by curves, but they’re generous in scale. “I know most of the artists who will be here,” says the architect. “I want to make a happy place for them.” The most stupendous gallery is the inside of “the boat”: 450 feet long, skylit, with a gently vaulted ceiling, and no supporting columns. “You can drive a tractor-trailer truck in here,” boasts Krens. “We have many works that are too big to show in New York that we can show here.” That includes pieces by Richard Serra, Claes Oldenburg and work from the controversial Count Panza collection of ’70s conceptual art, which the Guggenheim bought in 1990.
Despite the international buzz, many of the fiercely independent-minded Basques have knocked the project, mainly because of the huge public costs of building and operating it. There’s also resentment that an international institution will run the place, and show mostly international artists, not Basques (though some of the museum’s $50 million acquisition budget is earmarked for art by Basques and Spaniards). To this, Gehry replies, “We’re a world culture. We better get on with it.”
And at least the museum, according to everyone connected with the project, is on schedule and on budget. What made such a complex design feasible was the computer. Gehry doesn’t design on the computer, but a program called Catia translates his wildly irregular forms into computer images used to produce precise specs for the fabrication of steel and other elements. Gehry first used the computer on a large scale to design the Disney Concert Hall. As it turns out, the Bilbao museum may help a bit to get the concert hall built. One of Bilbao’s many recent visitors was Eli Broad, the California developer who’s heading a new commission appointed by Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan to raise the $265 million it will now take to build the hall (the initial Disney family gift of $50 million was half the estimated cost of the hall in 1988). Broad says he and others were “inspired” by the Bilbao museum’s “coming in just about on time and on budget and it being such a great piece of architecture.”
Gehry’s visits to the Bilbao site tend to end with a big dinner, with all the local architects and officials working on the project. The famously industrious Basques sure can raise the roof at these spirited, late-into-the-night events, but who could blame them for celebrating? Skeptics wonder if the projections of a half-million annual museum visitors by the year 2000 aren’t a little generous. But Gehry’s stunning building–witty, sensual, more fluent than anything he’s done before–is something that anyone who cares about art and design would want to see, even if it is off the beaten track. And that’s before they hang a single picture on the walls.
