PORTRAITURE

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao: A Building That Almost Dances

When I first set eyes on a Frank Gehry design, it was some 10 years ago in Seattle while standing in front of the Experience Music Project. While looking at the multicolored stainless-steel and painted aluminum shingles of the museum, I remember thinking to myself: “This guy [Gehry] must be having a laugh!” If the museum structure was meant to symbolize the energy and fluidity of music, for me the building only managed to suggest the sound that a record player needle makes when carelessly moved across an LP. I was far from being the only soul to whom this soaring structure suggested sudden hatred; Herbert Muschamp (the New York Times architecture critic) described the building as “something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died.”

  
Recently, however, my ill feelings toward everything Gehry took a turn for the better while driving along the Ria de Bilbao past the Puente Pedro Arrupe bridge just a few days ago. There, just across the river, stood the most magnificent structure: with its towering roof, reminiscent of a metallic flower, gleaming under the Spanish sun, the unmistakable silhouette of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao spectacularly enlivens the riverfront. And right there, my hatred for everything Gehry that I had thought was as unshakable as the architect’s signature metallic structures simply vanished.

Undulating like the waves of the nearby ocean were golden sheets of stainless steel reflecting the mood of the Spanish sky; thousands of shingles shimmered in the shifting light, pure gold one moment, silver grey the next, then taking on a buttery glow as the sun went down. As always, Gehry’s structure does not make any attempt to blend in. On the contrary. And from what I have heard, the Guggenheim in Bilbao was all about creating an object that would draw people to a relatively obscure Spanish city. Today, amid some earlier controversy, Gehry’s building’s sculptural form has achieved all that and much more as it is now far more famous than its contents, which have become of secondary importance for many. The murder of a Basque policeman, who was shot to death on the museum’s doorstep while foiling a plot by Basque separatists to disrupt the opening ceremonies, has long been forgotten.

To a pedestrian walking through Bilbao, the Guggenheim acts as a distraction from a city that until recently seldom made it on most travelers’ list of places to visit. Do not make any mistake; if Bilbao has almost completely shaken off its tumultuous past tied to a still-resistant Basque history, some areas of the city still remain somewhat as a no man’s land for most visitors—as one hotel receptionist reminded me that same day while drawing a big cross topped by a giant NO on my city map over an area near the Parque Miribilla, an area through which I drove in circles for some long minutes after taking a wrong turn off the San Francisco main road while diligently following my GPS instructions, which apparently had no intention of letting me out of the area.

Anyway . . .

If finding the entrance to the museum is a little confusing at first, one should just let Jeff Koons’ puppy towering over the small esplanade lead you to it; as it is there, a few steps away from the giant sculpture, that you will find your way in at the bottom of some 100 three-foot-deep steps that curve down to a dark set of doors. This rather disappointing entrance is, however, a mere distraction from the incredible site that makes up the interior of the Guggenheim. While its exterior harbors few sharp corners, the interior displays an incredible number of angles. During my first visit to the museum, a designer friend of mine pointed at such an angle, saying that studying it tells a long tale of how thoroughly the design has been thought through. Apparently, while looking closely at the places where different materials such as steel, concrete, glass and even wood come together, one can tell if the concept has been carefully planned from design through construction to finish. It is extremely telling to look at corners or angles within a building structure, noticing how materials with different properties and thicknesses come together and how they have been adjusted. In other words, while studying an angle, can you see an incredible amount of black silicone caulk filling large gaps, as found in Taniguchi’s design in New York, for instance? Suffice it to say, no amount of caulk was needed in Bilbao as the Guggenheim’s panels of steel, glass and cement come together beautifully throughout, a vibrant testimony to a well-thought-out construction. Another testimony to the beauty of this building is that it is virtually impossible to take a bad shot of that structure as it is incredibly photogenic—as the pictures taken from my Nokia (E71) phone can, I hope, testify.

At the time of my visit, during the second week of July 2009, the temporary exhibitions were first class. The exhibitions’ galleries, organized over three levels around the central atrium, are connected by a system of curving walkways hung from the roof. Occupying the central atrium was Inopportune: Stage One, by Cai Guo-Qiang, which presented six real cars in a cinematic progression that simulates a car bombing. In fact, the museum gave M. Guo-Quiang the entire second floor where visitors can still admire some of his work until the end of September 2009, such as Head On, which features 99 life-sized replicas of wolves, Reflection—A Gift from Iwaki with its excavated wooden boat spilling out thousands of broken pieces of pure white porcelain, I Want to Believe, which offers a series of drawings made by igniting explosives on paper and much more. But for me, the most unforgettable moment during my visit to the Guggenheim was while experiencing Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time. Permanently installed in the museum’s largest gallery, Richard Serra’s design made out of large sheets of weathered steel encourages viewers to move around—and sometimes through—the work, which creates a dizzying sensation of space in motion. A must-see.

If going through the three levels of exhibition halls took me just over an hour, I was far from being done with my visit as exiting the museum through the gift shop doors (empty handed) offered me with yet another magnificent view of what I truly feel is an architectural masterpiece. While visitors are not allowed to take pictures inside the building, the exterior reassuringly gives you the nod for flirting without restraint through the lens of your own camera. Changing like a jewel, the glowing metallic shield invited me to take yet another round of impromptu shots that lured me to believe what an incredible photographer I had become when, in fact, the shimmering shingles and undulating walls were doing all the work.

Looking at the Guggenheim Bilbao was like watching a building that almost set out to dance, and as Martha Graham used to say, “Nothing is more revealing than movement.”

Isabelle Assante

©2009