“The Design that started a Phenomenon”

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Bilbao, Spain. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was designed by Pritzker Prize winner, Frank Gehry, who is an American architect and designer. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was built between October 1993 and October 1997, and was inaugurated on 18 October 1997 by King Juan Carlos I of Spain. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has become very popular, drawing 20 million visitors to the city. The museum opened as part of a revitalization effort for the city of Bilbao- referred to as the Bilbao Effect. The Bilbao Effect, as described in the previous post, is a phenomenon whereby cultural investment plus showy architecture is supposed to equal economic uplift for cities in an economic decline. This is what Bilbao experienced due to the creation of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Upwards of 100,000 people visited the museum per month; hotels, restaurants, and public spaces were modernized; and the city of Bilbao generated $100 million in taxes during the museum’s first 3 years of operation. Today, about a million people visit Guggenheim Museum Bilbao a year. When asked about the design of the museum, Gehry claimed that the design was the culmination of a personal design language he developed in reaction to the prevalence of post-modernism architecture at the time. Though his earlier work, sometimes categorized as Deconstructivism, featured everyday building materials like chain link, corrugated metal, and plywood, by the late 1980s Gehry refined his vision. He started using more costly surfaces to produce sensuous designs. Throughout the museum, titanium, limestone, and glass were used to give this same sensuous effect. When Guggenheim Museum Bilbao debuted it was the largest of the Guggenheim Museums. It has 120,000 square feet of exhibition space and 260,000 square feet in total. In 2005, Vanity Fair surveyed 52 experts to determine the definitive construction project of the latter half of the 20th century. The results had 28 members of the survey (including 11 Pritzker Prize winners and the deans of 8 architectural schools) casting their votes in Gehry’s favor, pointing to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao as the most influential. He also received votes for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Millennium Park in Chicago, and his private residence in Santa Monica. All this goes to show the major influence Guggenheim Museum Bilbao had on the city of Bilbao, but also the world as a whole.