Bilbao Guggenheim Museum

An absolute icon of contemporary architecture, the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum sums up in itself merits and ambiguities of the new architectural languages in the years between the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the Third Millennium. While liberating his architecture from the constraints of Contextualism, Gehry introduces the hybridization as a methodological approach to a subtle conceptual alchemy: transforming the building from a purely functional structure to a mythopoeic object and creating amazing and alienating places.

He is the author of urban mythologies amplified onto a global scale through an effective mass media system. Over time, his works define a global network of structures based on a single model adaptable to many different contexts, thus implementing a one-alphabet language yet capable of generating complex narratives and endless emotions. It is clear that the traditional concept of genius loci should be completely reformulated since the museum complex not only rejects any contextual influence but also creates a completely new urban narrative. It is not the surroundings that accept the architectural work but it is the architecture itself that selects those urban and environmental elements to enter into an empathetic relation, as with the Nervion river whose waters look like an additional surface made of the same titanium coating the fine “leaves in the wind” which envelops the museum.

As a work dedicated to contemporary art, the complex is a lively space, capable of creating a constantly evolving urban vision through a three-dimensional screen—with not even a small flat surface—which selects the weather, the endless colors of the cars parked around, the natural alternation between night and day, and whatever else happens in the surroundings worth to be remembered.

The highly distinctive force of the Guggenheim is also displayed by its construction modalities. The titanium plates covering the architectural volumes are approximately thirty thousand, treated to last one hundred years: the raw material comes from Australia and is fused in France while the sheets are laminated in Pittsburgh and pickled in Britain. The complex in Bilbao exceeds the boundaries of modern architecture highlighting the advances in technology in a perfect synthesis, which combines rigorous engineering and creative freedom, behind which lurk refined structural calculations. Cementos Rezola of Arrigoriaga (Spanish subsidiary of Italcementi Group) provided all the concrete for this project.