The story of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain — a building that opened 20 years ago this week and changed the course of world architecture, the history of downtown Los Angeles and the career path of at least one American architecture critic — really begins on Aug. 26, 1983.
That’s the day disastrous flooding hit the Basque city, adding urgency to a nascent plan to rethink the civic role of the heavily polluted Nervión River, which cuts through the heart of Bilbao. That effort ultimately carved out new territory along its banks for parks and cultural buildings — including Gehry’s otherworldly museum.
Or maybe it’s necessary to go back even further, to the middle 1970s, when Bilbao, then still a powerful steel town, a sort of Basque-country Pittsburgh, began sketching out plans for a new subway and rail network. After an international competition in 1988, a consortium of architects and engineers led by London’s Foster and Partners created the new Bilbao Metro, which opened in fall 1995 — two full years before the Guggenheim. The network now consists of three lines and 41 stations.
...
Gehry’s trademark extroversion was still there, the same wild geometries and garrulous quality, but it was newly focused, contained. Instead of a jumble of forms clad in a jumble of materials — Gehry’s familiar Rauschenbergian approach — the unruly shapes were wrapped, across much of the building, inside a consistent and mesmerizing titanium skin. This made all the difference, especially in terms of first-glance impact. A daring poem has more force if it’s printed in one typeface, not seven.
The effect was easy to measure in Los Angeles as well. The Guggenheim’s rapturous reception essentially shamed city leaders here into raising the money needed to finish long-stalled Disney Hall — a building that was designed well before Gehry’s museum in Spain but would open to the public six years after it.
What if the concert hall had been finished first? Would the full Bilbao Effect, with all its benefits, have been ours to enjoy instead?
As any careful study of the Guggenheim makes clear, the answer is probably no. Los Angeles simply hadn’t laid the planning groundwork for our Gehry landmark nearly as well as Bilbao (which is one reason Disney Hall was so long delayed in the first place). Pre-Bilbao, a Gehry concert hall on Grand Avenue would have generated lots of attention; it wouldn’t have changed the fortunes of a region and its economy.
One last thing. We tend to forget how downtrodden architecture felt in the mid-1990s, before the Guggenheim opened, in part for a paradoxical reason: because the museum helped make the field such a recognizable force and presence in popular culture. Its lasting influence has obscured its original power, how much of an out-of-the-blue savior it seemed.
The resulting post-Bilbao ubiquity of architecture and famous architects (Gehry designed jewelry for Tiffany and appeared on “The Simpsons”) turned out to be its own trap, sapping the field’s political power and social conscience even as its hip quotient grew. There’s a new book from Columbia University Press, edited by Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter, called “Architecture Is All Over.” The title, of course, has a double meaning: architecture is everywhere and nowhere, stylish and impotent, feted and spent. That split personality is a Bilbao Effect too.
