This video series is realized in collaboration with ‘Architectures’ — a series presented by the Arts and Culture Bureau — offering unique views into the concepts and forms of built landmarks. every week, we present one building, accompanied by a short video from their youtube channel.
The story of the Guggenheim Bilbao begins in 1991, when Thomas Krens, then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, started looking for a museum site in Europe. When the mayor of Bilbao invited him to his city — where many factories were closing down, taking with them the prospect of young populations and visiting tourists — the industrial wasteland seemed unfitting for a museum. Yet, Krens saw it as a promising place to create a strongly identifiable building and one that would bring civic pride to the inhabitants of Bilbao.
The museum opened in 1997, on a site bordering the water. The strange sculpture made of deconstructed shapes and monumental curves is by Frank O. Gehry, who drew a dynamic form imbued in his creative inspirations and fantasies.
“Fish and their movements have always been part of my architectural vocabulary,” explains Gehry. “I think that it goes back to my childhood. Every Thursday, my grandmother took me to the Jewish Market, we bought a live carp and brought it home, where we put it in the bathtub. I played with the fish all day until my grandmother killed it to make fish bowls.”
The south-facing façade of the museum communicates with the city through linear edges and large windows, while the northern façade connects with the water through undulating, waving forms. Some will recognize a metal flower at the crown of the building, a fish and other symbols of the sea that appear in the forms and movements of the metal.
Gehry’s primary sketches for the building were subconsciously drawn lines, which the architect later refined to address building codes and interpret individual volumes like a sculptor with clay.
“I made ever bigger and bigger models, adding new elements and new pieces to the puzzle,” he says. “Once I was on the right track, and had appointed to where it might lead, I started to look at the various parts in more detail. They developed in their turn, then I went back to the rectangular box-like basis and looked at it. Then I started to change its form until I reached a certain stage where I stopped because I had felt that that was it.”
Guggenheim Bilbao; Photo by Flickr-User Ron G.
The engineering consultants used a program reserved for aviation models in order to render the building. No less than 56,000 points on the surface of the cardboard model were translated into a virtual visualization so that the practical feasibilities of each mass could be revealed.
Gehry compares the impressive interiors of the building as a mix between a futurist city like Metropolis and Brancusi’s workshop, cluttered with sculptures at a variety of scales. But most importantly, the museum functions correctly with auditorium, offices and exhibition spaces each given a dedicated place. The individual parts of the museum are linked through the atrium or by passageways in the upper floors, which offer views of the city through the museum’s transparent glass façade.
Concrete floors and plain white walls set the landscape for the modern gallery. In his design, Gehry creates vast rooms capable of housing monumental works as well as intimate corners for smaller pieces. The height of the building offers the possibility for natural and artificial light to be filtered, managed and controlled through skylights and indirect openings to the outside.
Interior of the Guggenheim Bilbao; (Left) Photo by Flickr-User Aris Gionis; (Right) Photo by Flickr-User Michael Jones
The titanium skin of the museum comprises 24,000 square meters (258,000 square feet) of metal plates, folded and bent, to emphasize the overarching movements of the shape. Throughout the day, the scales capture the light and shine in the sunset light.
“I spent a lot of time trying to understand the light in Bilbao,” explains Gehry. “The steel that I was meant to use in the beginning gave off nothing at all in the light of that region. The metal seemed to be dead under a gray sky, but quite by chance, we found that titanium is very well-suited to this sort of light.”
Though expensive, its price suddenly dropped lower than steel when it was time for construction, allowing for this unique project to be completed. Because this economic phenomenon has never been replicated since, the Guggenheim Bilbao remains the only one of Gehry’s projects to use the material with such liberty.
Bilbao and Its Guggenheim; Photo by Flickr-User Iker Merodio
The “Bilbao Effect” is an urban phenomenon that has since been replicated around the world, where fantastical architectures strive to revive cities struggling to reinvent their landscapes and identities or reintroduce neglected areas to both tourists as well as the city’s own inhabitants.
Enjoy this video feature? You can check out similar movies on buildings like Herzog & de Meuron’s VitraHaus, French architect Jean Prouvé’s House, SANAA’s Rolex Learning Center, the House of Sugimoto and Zaha Hadid’s Phaeno Science Center.
Cover Image: Exterior Detail of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Courtesy of Phaidon
This video was directed by Julien Donada and coproduced by the Centre Pompidou, the Ministere de la Culture et de la Communication Direction de l’Architecture et du Patrimonies, ARTE France and Les Films d’Ici, with the participation of the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao and the support of the Centre National de la Cinématographie.