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12 THE NEW REVIEW | 01. 1 0. 17 | The Observer

ARCHITECTURE

THE BILBAO EFFECT HOW

THIS BUILDING CREATED

A GLOBAL PHENOMENON

“a driver of economic renewal”, an

“agent of economic development”

that would appeal to a “universal

audience”, create a “positive image”

and “reinforce self-esteem”. All of

which it pretty much did. It has

been rewarded with a steady million

visitors a year, the 20 millionth

having arrived shortly before the

20th birthday.

Gehry, who beat two other

architects in the competition to

design the building, recalls that he

was asked to design what was then

not called an icon. He was nervous.

“They said: ‘Mr Gehry, we need the

Sydney Opera House. Our town is

dying.’ I looked at them and said:

‘Where’s the nearest exit? I’ll do my

best but I can’t guarantee anything.’”

So he came up with the convulsive,

majestic, climactic assembly of

titanium and stone, of heft and

shimmer, a cross-breed of palazzo

and ship that also fl ips its tail like a

jumping fi sh, that now stands on the

bank of the river Nervión.

It was not a wholly new set of ideas –

Sydney, indeed, had demonstrated the

value of the transformative landmark,

as had Paris with the Pompidou Centre.

Frankfurt, Glasgow and Pittsburgh had

striven to raise themselves with culture

and/or museum-building. What set

Bilbao apart was the degree of contrast

between the city’s lowly status and the

artistic and architectural ambition of

its proposed fl agship.

They found an ally in the Solomon R

Guggenheim Foundation of New York,

which had previous in commissioning

icons from architects named Frank, in

the form of Frank Lloyd Wright’s white

spiralling museum on Fifth Avenue.

It was then run by Thomas Krens , the

holder of an MBA from Yale and a man

formed by the risk-taking, deal-making

culture of the 1980s. The Bilbao people

had heard that the Guggenheim

wanted to expand its European

presence, and plans to do this by

adding to the Peggy Guggenheim

collection in Venice weren’t “going

forward sweetly”, as Vidarte puts

it, so they off ered their battered

city in place of La Serenissima. The

Guggenheim, he says, liked their ideas

and their seriousness.

An agreement was worked out, an

early instance of the international

trading of museum brands that

also engenders, for example, the

forthcoming Louvre Abu Dhabi ,

whereby the governments of the

city, and of the province and region

in which Bilbao stands, would pay

for construction, and contribute to

acquisitions and running costs. The

Guggenheim Foundation would lend

its name, works from its permanent

collections and its management and

curatorship. The arrangement wasn’t

universally popular – it was called

“McGuggenheim”, an act of cultural

imperialism paid for by the people it

subjected – but it gave Bilbao access to

the high-quality art without which a

museum would be pointless.

The Canadian-born Gehry,

now aged 88 , was then in his 60s,

and he had a high reputation in

the architectural world for his

imaginative reinterpretations of the

everyday structures of his adopted

home of Los Angeles. He didn’t

have the celebrity he gained later

(an appearance on The Simpsons,

for example), and although he was

known for the freedom of his forms,

the public hadn’t yet seen much of

Opened 20 years ago, the Guggenheim museum by

Frank Gehry had a wow factor that cities around the

globe were desperate to copy, writes Rowan Moore

W

hen he got to Bilbao a
month before it opened,
says Frank Gehry , “I
went over the hill and
saw it shining there. I
thought: ‘What the fuck have I done
to these people?’” The “it” is the
Bilbao Guggenheim museum, which
made both its architect Gehry and
the Basque city world-famous. Its
achievement, measured in much-
repeated metrics of visitor numbers
and economic uplift, in global
recognition and media coverage, in
being, in eff ect, an Instagram sensation
long before anyone knew what that
might be, is prodigious. It revived

belief that architecture could be

ambitious, beautiful and popular all at

once, yet Gehry has always said that its

success took him by surprise.

The museum was opened 20 years

ago this month, by the king and queen

of Spain, since when it has become

the most infl uential building of

modern times. It has given its name to

the “Bilbao eff ect” – a phenomenon

whereby cultural investment plus

showy architecture is supposed to

equal economic uplift for cities down

on their luck. It is the father of “iconic”

architecture, the prolifi c progenitor

of countless odd-shaped buildings

the world over. Yet rarely, if ever, have

the myriad wannabe Bilbaos matched

the original. This is probably because

it came about through a coincidence

of conditions that is unlikely to

happen again.

Despite Gehry’s protestations

of surprise, it is a project that has

fulfi lled its original intentions with

precision. Juan Ignacio Vidarte ,

the museum’s director, whose

involvement dates back to the time of

its inception in the early 90 s, says that

it was meant to be “a transformational

project”, a catalyst for a wider plan

to turn around an industrial city

in decline and affl icted by Basque

separatist terrorism. It was to be