CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. THE CONTEXT

Industrialism in Bilbao and the Basque Region

Bilbao 2000 and Exhibition Cities

The Guggenheim as Opportunity

Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum

2. ARCHITECTURE AND THE CITY

A Mediation Between City and River: The ‘Court’

The Definition of the ‘Court’

“Snakes and Fishes” and The Dynamic of The City

The Event (I)

3. THE BUILDING AS IMAGE

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s ‘Culture Industry’

Basque Nationalism and the PNV

ETA and Basque Separatist Terrorism

4. ENGAGEMENT AND PARTICIPATION

Image and Reality

An Experiential Architecture

Volume and Skin: The Temporary Exhibition Gallery

Computers and Titanium

CONCLUSIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION

Variously described as "the twisted wreckage of itself,"[1] "The greatest building of our time,"[2] and "a disposable tinfoil extravaganza,"[3] Frank Gehry's new Guggenheim Museum shimmers in the Spanish light as its twisting, sinuous titanium forms stretch along the Nervion River beneath the unforgiving brutalist structure of Bilbao's La Salve bridge (Fig.1). Conceived as an iconic flagship for the city's regeneration, the building anchors itself around the bridge, introducing the notion of the inter-dependency of cultural and physical infrastructures as fundamental to the success of an international financial and commercial centre. Furthermore, this apparent incongruity between architecture and context highlights the peculiarity of establishing a museum of contemporary art at the centre of a city suffering from the fallout of industrialism. Moreover, this is the new Guggenheim Museum, establishing a European outpost for its New York-based multinational expansion in what has been termed the 'Wigan of Spain'.

Frank Gehry, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and the city of Bilbao co-exist as mutually dependent partners in the museum. They each create opportunities, upon which the remaining two parties capitalise in order to fuel and support their own intentions and motivations. Together they form an hermetic circle, at the centre of which lies the architecture of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.

Chapter 1, 'The Context', explores the industrial and cultural heritage of Bilbao and the Basque Region as a means of situating current plans for the regeneration of the city for its 700th anniversary in the year 2000. Bilbao is basing its future development on its historic strengths in the financial and commercial sectors of society, aiming to establish itself as a "modern European city."[4] In an increasingly global economic and cultural context, however, Bilbao is taking its transformation one step further, and is intent on composing an identity for itself based largely upon high-profile architecture and institutions. This phenomenon of the contemporary exhibition city will be situated in relation to the nineteenth and twentieth-century World Fairs and Great Exhibitions. The Guggenheim Foundation's intentions for multinational expansion will be examined as presenting an opportunity for Bilbao to add its name to the international cultural map, leading to an outline of the physical site and the museum.

Chapter 2 intends to relate this contextual background to Frank Gehry's intentions with respect to architecture's place within the ever-changing dynamic of the city. Drawing on the precedents established by Gehry's work in the last twenty years, the architectural forms and spatial structure of the Guggenheim will be seen as fundamental to the desired integration of the art museum and the city.

The following two chapters will concentrate on the consequences of the architecture of Gehry's Guggenheim Museum. Chapter 3 will explore the notion of the architectural object as a cultural commodity, with specific reference to the theory of the 'Culture Industry' as described by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. This will introduce the media event of Bilbao and its implications upon the Basque political paradox between progress and the conservation of tradition. The final chapter - in complete contrast to Chapter 3 - is conceived as an experiential reading of the architecture of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, to establish the concepts of engagement and participation essential to an understanding of the building, and to explore the ambiguities and complexities which present themselves in the three-dimensional presence of the museum. This will involve an examination of the relationship between architecture and art, with respect to spatial, formal, material, and structural concerns.
1. THE CONTEXT

Industrialism in Bilbao and the Basque Region

Bilbao is the capital of the Basque region of northern Spain, a collection of adjacent provinces consisting of Giupúzcoa, Vizcaya, much of Navarre, and extending to include part of south-western France (Fig.2). It is impossible to trace the history of the original inhabitants of the Basque provinces - and their contemporary descendants - to any specific European or ethnic group; their language, Euskera, does not derive from Latin or Anglo-Saxon roots. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Basques established towns and industries throughout the provinces, and, by virtue of their autochthonous individuality, developed unique local customs known as fueros. Their foral autonomy - that is, related directly to the fueros - was maintained virtually unchanged until 1840.

Bilbao was founded in 1300 by Diego López de Haro as a trade and fishing town on the banks of the Nervion River which discharges into the Bay of Biscay (Fig.3). From that time its development was characterised by an oscillation between progress, in the form of industrialisation, and the conservation of the Basque foral traditions. The transformation from small trade and fishing town to mercantile port reflected the impact of the fifteenth-century increase in shipping, iron-works, and manufacturing around the Bay of Biscay. This industrialisation and the associated establishment of the port and large-scale trading led to the evolution of the city's highly regarded financial and commercial institutions.

Such transformations couldn’t fail to have an impact on Basque culture as the area began to attract attention and investment from international parties, and more particularly from the forward-looking Spanish state. Stanley Payne, in his book Basque Nationalism, explains that “for nearly a millennium the Basques had shown a remarkable ability to accept technical improvements from the outside world without completely altering the foundations of their own culture.”[5] The First Carlist War, from 1833 to 1840, resulted in the defeat of the Carlists - whom the Basques had supported - by the Liberalists, who favoured a centralised, integrated Spain. For the Basque population this signalled the start of the decline of their fueros, and the birth of the dichotomy between complete foral autonomy and the Liberalist’s emphasis on municipal autonomy under state rule. Payne describes how “Vizcaya was internally divided because of the tension between its prosperous chief port and commercial centre, Bilbao, and the poorer small towns and rural areas. This tension was a common phenomenon in Vizcayan history but had been building again during the past half century with the renewed growth of Bilbao.”[6] Growing industrialisation combined with the simultaneous modernisation of Spain began to undermine the cultural and traditional foundations of the Basque region. In deference to this situation, the Basque population created myths deriving from their ‘purist’ history, an attempt at perpetuating their individuality in the face of growing homogenisation.

With the enormous increase in industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bilbao asserted itself as the largest and most important city in the Basque region, its city fabric expanding across the Nervion River, from the original Casco Viejo market town of the Middle Ages, with its characteristic 'Seven Streets' and cathedral, to the grid of the Indautxu District, based around industry and commerce (Fig.4&5). Technical education and financial institutions continued to flourish, culminating in the 1850’s and 60’s with the increase in foreign trade and the foundation of banking and credit facilities including the BBV (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya), today one of the largest banks in Spain. Between 1875 and 1895 Vizcayan iron production increased over twenty times such that the Basque region was producing most of the Spanish supply, which itself constituted 21.5% of the world’s iron ore production. In addition, the region experienced new investment in the form of hydroelectric stations, growth in the railways, and the establishment of ship-building industries due to the importance of Bilbao’s port.

Industrialism reached a peak with the advent of the First World War, with Vizcaya producing 80% of Spanish steel. “From iron and steel, industrial development expanded into chemicals, cement, and paper, and hydroelectric projects in neighbouring regions were also financed and promoted.”[7] This prompted the novelist Pío Baroja to write: "Bilbao is a town that daily grows more concentrated and more interesting. Its estuary is one of the most impressive things in Spain. I do not think there is anything else in the Iberian peninsula that gives such an impression of strength, labour and energy as those 14 or 15 kilometres of waterway."[8] (Fig.6)

In 1916 Deusto University was founded in Bilbao on the strength of business and finance performance. Even after the war the situation showed no signs of faltering, with a 235% increase in steel production between 1920 and 1930. This would have been inconceivable were it not for the low taxes and high subsidies and tariffs that were benefits of regional autonomy under the central government. The region attracted large numbers of non-Basque immigrants - constituting the majority of the industrial workers - who, combined with the main sector workers, urban businessmen, and upper bourgeoisie, began to out-number the Basque traditionalists and their fight for renewed foral autonomy: "Modernisation in terms of urbanisation and industrialisation had gone farther in Vizcaya and Giupúzcoa than anywhere else in Spain save Barcelona, creating major tensions and challenges to status, values, and identity."[9] The situation was exacerbated with the Spanish Civil War between 1933 and 1936. The Basques supported the Republican government of the time with the promise of the maintenance of their regional autonomy after the defeat of the insurgents. Instead, the Republicans were overthrown by the Franco Regime, and the resultant implications for the Basque nationalists were enormous as Franco suppressed all regional cultural inheritance, and all regional languages, including Euskera.

Following the death of Francesco Franco in November 1975, Spain restored its decentralised democratic parliament, and in 1979 the Basque region was recognised as an 'autonomous community within the Spanish state'. At this time the industries - which had been developing so vigorously, and which formed the basis of the region's economy - began to face major difficulties with the looming recession. The situation was brought to a crescendo with the rise in oil prices, aggravating problems with the heavy industries which had been hidden by the enormous expansion in recent decades: poor efficiency and structuring of steel and iron-working, mining, and ship-building industries assisted in their rapid decline. Like so many nineteenth-century industrial cities, Bilbao was facing the devastating collapse of its economy.

Bilbao 2000 and Exhibition Cities

Contemporary Bilbao represents the epitome of the post-industrial city. Even Ibon Areso, Deputy Mayor in Charge of City Planning and the Environment, admits that "chaotic development led to a city which was a blurred mixture of residential and aggressive industrial areas where local identities were diluted to form a bland, shapeless urban continuum."[10](Fig.7) It suffered immensely with the decline of the industries, resulting in "high unemployment rates, a decay in the environment and the fabric of the city itself, emigration and urban stagnation and problems of marginalisation."[11] It has thus become uncompetitive at international level. However, this by no means signals the city's permanent demise. Bilbao is in the process of regenerating itself for its 700th anniversary in the year 2000: "In Bilbao, we are actually building a new Bilbao for the year 2000."[12]

In order to make an impact on the international network of business cities, Bilbao is determined to establish an identity for itself as a progressive financial centre with a strong cultural heritage and foundation. Bilbao’s history of strengths in finance and commerce - with the BBV and other large banking and insurance companies, and its important educational facilities such as Deusto University - has opened the door for the city’s entrance into the international network of leading cities. In addition, the problems faced by industrial Bilbao have led to opportunities in its plans for regeneration; road and rail infrastructures have been updated and improved (Fig.8), and the old port has been closed and redeveloped at the junction of the Nervion River and the Bay of Biscay. Combined with the fact that the growth of Bilbao has reached its geographic limits - in its situation in a valley between rolling hills - this demolition and recovery of industrial land and warehouses has freed up much-needed space for new uses and development. City redevelopment thus takes one of three inter-dependent forms: commercial, infra-structural, or cultural. It is these three areas and the associated high profile architectural structures - the proyectos - that now take over as the foundations for a city renewal and a contemporary Great Exhibition (Fig.9-15).

The original Great Exhibitions of France and England were set up to celebrate achievements in the fields of industry and technology, to encourage the education of the masses, and hence to stimulate mercantilist culture. These exhibitions were initially conceived on a level similar to contemporary trade fairs, but organisers and governments soon realised their potential for the presentation of artistic and cultural heritage. The “Society of Arts” - later to become the Royal Academy - was established in England in 1754, and was associated with exhibitions where they gave “rewards to worthwhile ventures in the liberal arts where they could be shown to have beneficial effects upon commerce and industry.”[13] This view of the utilitarian, secondary role of the arts, as subservient to industry, was seen in subsequent exhibitions as ill-representative of the strong tradition of the Fine Arts in European countries. In the exhibitions in 1853 in Dublin, and 1855 in Paris, these arts were thus accorded a position of autonomy and importance. The precedent was set for the combination of industry and Fine Art as representing cultural heritage, technological insight, and national progress.

The potential of this promotion of trade and progress was first exploited in the Berlin “All German” Exhibition of 1844, and later in the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, both of which opened their doors to international participation as an opportunity to demonstrate national prestige and identity, and to provoke colonial competition. The Paris Exposition Universelle in 1855 was the first to combine international participation with the demonstration of both technology and the Fine Arts, and set the tone for all future exhibitions.

Not to be out-done by their European counterparts, American World Fairs promoted national unity through increasingly populist methods, enticing visitors with the promise of entertainment. National competition, represented in the opulence and extravagance of American World Fairs versus Parisian Expositions Universelles, increased in the exhibitions leading up to the Second World War, reaching its climax with the final Parisian Exposition Universelle in 1937, and the New York World’s Fair of 1939 - the definitive entertainment fair.

Following the Second World War, prevailing modernist ideologies and technologies were called into question, and so too were the foundations of the original Exhibitions and Fairs. In his book Ephemeral Vistas, Greenhalgh has commented on the situation of exhibitions today: “Exhibitions cost an enormous amount to stage. It would be inconceivable that events of the relative scale of those held at South Kensington, Chicago, St. Louis or Paris could happen now. No-one could afford them and more importantly, no-one has adequate reason to bother; the roles they fulfilled are now taken care of by various separate media.”[14] Written before the recent exhibitions at Osaka and Seville, the implications of this quote are expanded and strengthened by Catherine Slessor in the Architectural Review in June 1992 with respect to the Seville Expo: “Exactly what Expo ‘92 can offer the visitor is open to debate - particularly in an age when the ethics and effects of Western industrial culture, which benevolently underpinned [sic] Expos from New York to Osaka, are being called into question.”[15] Exhibitions seem to have reached a critical point in their evolution where the values and agendas which formed their initial impetus must be re-evaluated. Does Bilbao - with its quest for the installation of an urban identity in the context of the international regeneration of industrial cities - present the opportunity for this re-evaluation to take place?

The competition between industrial nations has been superseded by a media-driven competition between cities and their financial, economic, and commercial sectors. Parallels can be drawn between the competitive French Expositions and American Fairs, with their exhibition buildings, and competing cities such as Frankfurt, Paris, and Barcelona, with their international high profile architects and buildings. Greenhalgh comments that: “Especially for the host nation, the exhibition would invariably be a celebration of the past as a preparation for a better future. Therein lay the interest for government, for industry and the arts, that ‘things will get better.’”[16] He continues: “[because exhibitions] were a principal means whereby government and private bodies presented their vision of the world to the masses...the funding behind them invariably involved political machination of one kind or another.”[17] Bilbao’s renewal is made possible due to a combination of city and Basque resources and funds. Thus Bilbao 2000 illustrates - in addition to the shift in foundation from technology and industry in the original expositions to the contemporary emphasis on finance and economics - a transformation from national pride to that of a mixture of city and Basque pride. This pride is formulated by the identity of the city, which is embodied in the architectural proyectos of Calatrava, Foster, Stirling, and Gehry. Umberto Eco has argued that “in an exposition, architecture proves to be message first, then utility: meaning first, then stimulus...in an exposition we show not the objects but the exposition itself. The basic ideology of an exposition is that the building and the objects in it should communicate the value of a culture, the image of a civilization.”[18]

This returns to the recurrent Basque paradox between modernisation - manifest here in the composition of a global identity for the city - and Basque traditions. Do the brand-name architects and trade-mark buildings, while continuing the exposition idea of the ‘building as exhibit’, merely signify the continuing proliferation of a set of established - but alien - architectural standards, at the expense of local characteristics? If so, how can this global, image-based city structure avoid neutralising and homogenising the diversity of traditions and culture that defines the individuality of the regional population?

The Guggenheim Foundation was approached by the Basque government with the proposal to establish a joint venture European Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. Such a project would undoubtedly aid in Bilbao’s composition of an international cultural identity, while fulfilling in part the Guggenheim’s aims for multinational expansion. Such a use of cultural esteem for political benefit has a precedent in the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris Exposition Universelle. The pavilion shows Spain attempting to demonstrate national integrity and unity during the Civil War, for the three-fold mission of a). attracting foreign aid in the Republic’s fight against the insurgents, b). fostering fear in the minds of those questioning national integrity, and c). perpetuating hope and belief in the minds of the members of the Republic and its supporters. Greenhalgh has commented on the power of the presentation of a national identity in the face of revolution as “an immense show of strength designed to intimidate potential insurrectionists.”[19] As a means to this end, the Spanish Pavilion used cultural activity to demonstrate political aims, with the commission of (predominantly Spanish) modern artists to join the struggle against Franco and his regime. The pavilion included sculpture by Alberto, Julio Gonzalez, Pablo Picasso, and the American Alexander Calder, and paintings and murals by Míro and Picasso. The works by the latter artists embody the plight of regionalism under Fascist rule, with Míro’s “Le Faucher” (The Reaper) - a representation of a Catalan nationalist song later banned by Franco - and Picasso’s “Guernica” (Fig.16). Recognised as one of the masterpieces of modern painting, “Guernica” depicts the devastation inflicted on April 19th 1937 with the saturation bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German planes. The Times explained how “Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed...by insurgent air-raiders.”[20] Despite Franco’s out-spoken support for Hitler and Mussolini - he was named the ‘child of Hitler and Mussolini’ - the rest of Europe saw Spain’s use of culture to oppose Fascism as an embarrassment, and did nothing to prevent the Franco regime from continuing its domination until its ultimate success. The precedent was set, however, for the use of the arts to foster national - and especially Basque and Catalan regional - unification, Picasso's “Guernica” surviving as a reminder of the importance of regional diversity as representative of national democracy and heterogeneity, and of the destructive nature of the Fascist dictatorship. In a similar way to this appeal for foreign aid in the plight of regionalist identity, the Guggenheim's involvement in Bilbao's regeneration signals a concurrent intention to strengthen the traditions of the Basque Region.

The Guggenheim as Opportunity

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established in 1937 as 'The Museum of Non-Objective Painting'. This specificity in the collection stemmed from a meeting between Solomon R. Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay a decade earlier, when Rebay, in the United States promoting European avant-garde artists such as Jean Arp and Wassily Kandinsky, took Guggenheim on a tour of Europe. Rebay offered a systematic approach to Guggenheim’s acquisitions, which themselves formed a continuation of a family tradition of collecting visual art in order to play an active role in the cultural and civic life of the country.

As the collection expanded over the following years, it was recognised that the gallery premises - originally situated in a converted car show-room - were too small, and that a new building would have to be acquired or built. In 1943, Rebay approached Frank Lloyd Wright, who commenced design of the New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Fig.17). Before it was even built, the museum highlighted changes that would have to be made to the collection as it stood. Firstly, Wright’s exhibition spaces - characterised by a clear, open and democratic spatial structure - seemed to contradict the elitist specificity of Rebay’s concept of the collection. In addition, the cost of Wright’s museum signalled the necessity for the collection to broaden in scope in order to attract a wider and less specialised audience to make the project economically feasible. Over the following decades, the original European avant-garde art was accompanied by contemporary works by artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Francis Bacon. In 1976, Peggy Guggenheim’s collection of 'Art Of This Century' - begun in 1948 - was acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, including the Ca’ Venier dei Leoni palace in Venice, Italy. By the 1980’s, Wright’s museum was falling into disrepair, and, in order to resolve this, and to accommodate the continually growing collection, Gwathmey and Siegel were commissioned to renovate and extend the original museum. To much (inevitable) criticism, the museum was re-opened in 1992 with 51,100sq.ft. of exhibition space in comparison to the original 31,700. The offices were expanded, and the new gallery spaces were large enough to accommodate a greater variety of art works than the original spaces. Even so, this main Guggenheim museum can only display 5% of the current collection at any one time.

In 1988, Thomas Krens was made Director of the Guggenheim. His intentions for the Foundation are expressed in this quote from the Guggenheim Magazine: “That the museums of the future will no longer resemble the familiar institutional and social form that has quietly and persistently evolved over the past two hundred years is a foregone conclusion. Those institutions that move to successfully address these fundamental issues and are the first to restructure will be the ones to survive and flourish in the 21st century.”[21] A major part of this restructuring involves Krens’ vision of the Guggenheim Foundation as an international organisation (Fig.18). This echoes Peggy Guggenheim’s recognition that the art museum of the future will be based around decentralisation, with seats on every continent, encouraging new staff to establish new collections and exhibitions, with an emphasis on mutual exchange. For the Guggenheim Foundation, this is where the importance of the joint venture with the Basque government and the municipality of Bilbao lies. The venture is effectively based around the input of Basque money combined with the Guggenheim Foundation’s expertise and advice. Thus the Basque authorities are the sole proprietors of the museum, having invested the initial $100million for Gehry’s building; in addition the Basques will pay for the continuing running costs of the museum, along with the anticipated new acquisitions of (largely Basque and Spanish) art. In response, the Guggenheim Foundation will provide the Bilbao Guggenheim with its international expertise on the development of its collection and on the day-to-day running of the museum; 75% of the staff at Bilbao are Basque or Spanish, with the New York offices acting as the general administration centre. The new museum is equally important to the Foundation in that it allows for an economy of scale for restoration, research, publications, and exhibition activities. In response to the apparent peculiarity of locating the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Krens states: "With contemporary society and transportation being what it is, the idea that the museum does not have to be in the centre of the universe to have a valid program also leads to the argument that if the art is significant, people will come to see it, make a pilgrimage to it. And therefore it also makes the argument for concentration. You can afford to get different identities because you're no longer bounded by the concept of the encyclopaedia."[22] Thus Bilbao's cultural heritage could offer the Guggenheim the focus that it desired. In a twist of fate, it was intended that Picasso's Guernica would be re-located from the Prado in Madrid to the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Safe-guarded in New York during Franco's dictatorship, the return of this art-work to the Basque Region would carry a significant weight in the restoration of Basque heritage and pride. However, despite the Spanish congress approving its move, the painting was deemed too fragile for transportation, and remains in Madrid.

Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim

Krens was initially approached by the Basque government in April 1991 with an invitation to collaborate in the redevelopment of a former wine-storage warehouse, the Alhóndiga, a remnant of early twentieth-century industrialism (Fig.19). By this time, a proposal was prepared in model form which explored the possibility of destroying the interior of the Alhóndiga, and replacing it with a high glass box, while retaining the “fenestrated medieval castle”[23] shell. Krens was dubious of the propriety of such a proposal - the Alhóndiga was one of the first cast-concrete structures in Spain - and so considered either restoring the building, or converting a concrete-frame car-park structure opposite the Alhóndiga into a museum, which would allow for high, unobstructed spaces. Doubtful of the potential of either structure as a site - whether used individually or together - Krens enlisted the assistance of Frank Gehry.

Krens and Gehry had worked together prior to the Bilbao Guggenheim on MASSMoCA, a project involving the conversion of a 28-building factory complex in North Adams, Massachusetts, into gallery spaces for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Gehry had further experience of the conversion of industrial areas and warehouses in the form of his 1983 ‘Temporary Contemporary’ gallery insertion into Los Angeles warehouse buildings for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (Fig.20).

On visiting Bilbao, Gehry was in agreement with Krens that neither the Alhóndiga nor the car-park building offered sufficient opportunity for the housing of an important gallery of contemporary art. From the top of a hill overlooking the city, Krens and Gehry decided that an appropriate site for such an art gallery of international stature would, paradoxically, be one of the most run-down industrial waste-land areas of the city (Fig.21). The site is at the heart of Bilbao’s “geocultural triangle”, the three vertices of which are characterised by the Museo de Bellas Artes (The Museum of Modern Art), Deusto University, and the Teatro Arriaga (The Opera House). Part of the old harbour area on the bank of the Nervion River at the periphery of the nineteenth-century Indautxu business district, the site was originally home to a disused brick lumber mill, abandoned cars, warehouses, and a number of enormous steel crane structures, further remnants of the city’s ship-building and industrial heritage (Fig.22). Approximately triangular in plan, the site is bounded on its northern edge by the Nervion River, to the south by the Alameda de Mazarrede, and on its third, western edge by a busy dock-land area stocked with steel shipping crates. The site is cut in two by the Puente de la Salve, an unforgiving steel bridge linking the nineteenth-century city with its predecessor dating back to the Middle Ages. After a two-week invited ‘geopolitical’ architectural competition, involving Arata Isozaki (representing Asia), Frank Gehry (America), and Wolf D. Prix (Europe), Gehry was chosen as the architect for the new Guggenheim museum, his sentiments summed up as follows: “To be at the bend of a working river intersected by a large bridge, and connecting the urban fabric of a fairly dense city to the river’s edge with a place for modern art is my idea of heaven.”[24]

The museum is based around a primary mediating sequence between the business district of the city and the Nervion River, and is seen as a key component of the future redevelopment of the river-front area to the east and west. The bulk of the museum exists to the west of the Puente de la Salve (Fig.23 Plans, sections, elevations at back of essay). The primary public sequence begins in a new plaza adjacent to the Alameda de Mazarrede, descends to the main public entrance, continues into the atrium - the centre-piece of the design, and an interior public ‘room’ - and arrives finally in the Temporary Exhibition gallery, the largest space of the museum and, at 30m x 130m, the largest single uninterrupted gallery space in the world. This gallery passes underneath the bridge, culminating in a sculptural stone-clad tower on the east side of the site. The remaining nineteen gallery spaces are arranged in separate but inter-dependent sequences revolving around the atrium, and consist of regular orthogonal stone-clad forms, and titanium-clad curvilinear forms, with glazed interstices. Due to the Guggenheim Foundation’s administration centre in New York City, the ratio of ancillary spaces to gallery spaces is approximately 1:1, rather than a more usual 2:1. A cafe/bar, museum-shop, and auditorium are located to the west, a blue-render administration block and library to the south, and a further restaurant to the east, offering itself to the river from underneath the bridge. ‘Back-stage’ areas dedicated to delivery, restoration, conservation, and storage are located under the stepped entrance ramp and external plaza, and have an associated access road off a proposed highway at river level, beneath the Alameda de Mazarrede. The current exhibition - “The Guggenheim Museums and the Art of this Century” - occupies all twenty galleries with works ranging from Picasso, Kandinsky, and Mondrian paintings to large pieces of Pop Art by Oldenburg, Warhol, and Rauschenberg, with a number of galleries dedicated to the display of individual artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Francesco Clemente.

2. ARCHITECTURE AND THE CITY

A Mediation Between City and River: The Court

From the centre of the Indautxu business district, the Bilbao Guggenheim is approached down the via Iparraguirre. This arrives at the new stone-paved external public plaza, which is guarded by Jeff Koons’ ‘Puppy’, an enormous Yorkshire Terrier consisting of 60,000 pansies (Fig.24). ‘Puppy’ “communicates love, warmth, and happiness to everyone,”[25] and stands as a popular symbol of this art museum’s relation to Bilbao’s inhabitants. From the plaza there are four options to continue onwards. To the west, a stepped ramp descends to river level and a curved walkway, forming the first installation of the redevelopment of the river-front area for pedestrians. Directly ahead, and remaining at plaza level, is the glazed entrance to the museum shop and cafe, situated beneath two curved titanium canopies and the ‘Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa’ sign, which is supported by an intricate steel framework casting an array of shadows on to the Spanish limestone walls (Fig.25&26). The third option, to the right, is a discreet entrance to the administration offices and library. But, by far the most seductive of the choices is to descend the long stepped ramp beneath the bulging, peeling cheek of one of the galleries, to the glazed main entrance of the museum, continuing the primary public sequence of movement, and echoing the gradual descent along the via Iparraguirre from the Indautxu District to the site. It is a powerful experience, and one fraught with contradictions. At once a continuation of the public realm, it also presents a dislocation, like a descent into the depths of unknown waters, overwhelming in its sense of serenity and expectation. Gehry is aware of the strength of the move: “The problem of the building is to articulate the city with the river, to bring the city across the road and then wrap it down to the river. The ramp is already there...it's pretty good, you can see it; damn strong..."[26] There is a feeling of compression upon entering the fully glazed reception area, establishing the impression that this is an external space that has been captured by the grouping of the stone and titanium clad forms of the museum (Fig.27). The extremities of this space are defined by these forms, with smaller-scale areas established by information and ticket-sales desks, and by the insertion of a titanium-clad structural column. Circular in plan, this column defines areas of circulation using the minimum of means possible.

Glimpsed between two stone forms, the vast verticality of the atrium invites entry. Defined by Gehry on one of his sketches as a ‘court’[27], and by Coosje van Bruggen as a “plaza-like Great Hall,”[28] this space accentuates the feeling of interstitial external space defined by the gallery forms rotating around its perimeter. The court is sub-divided by the insertion of plaster, titanium, stone, and glass pieces, resulting in an emphasis on a vertical spiralling of forms (Fig.28). These variously house stairs, elevators, and gallery spaces, and express one of Gehry’s primary ideas on the application of sculpture to architecture: “To say that a building has to have a certain kind of architectural attitude to be a building is too limiting, so the best thing to do is to make the sculptural functional in terms of use. If you can translate the beauty of sculpture into the building - whatever it does to give movement and feeling, that’s where the innovation in architecture is.”[29] Gehry has achieved this kind of sculptural functionalism in the court, creating a space imbued with a dynamism reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s central, top-lit spiral in the New York Guggenheim (Fig.29), although, at 55 metres, Bilbao’s is over one-and-a-half times as high. Gehry is able to avoid the functional problems of Wright’s notoriously difficult space by keeping the court free of art. Earlier sketch schemes show Gehry battling with attempts at providing hanging space, but Krens was determined to prevent this: “It simply was not necessary to create exhibition space in the atrium.” Krens told Gehry: “This atrium is yours, you’re the artist here. This is your sculpture...you then make perfect exhibition spaces around it.”[30] Krens’ idea was of an ‘architect’s’ space - in the vein of Wright’s - that artists would react to with site-specific installations. This differing of opinion reminded Gehry of a discussion he had had with the artist Daniel Buren fifteen years earlier, where Gehry had supposed that artists would want a neutral white box so as not to detract from the art. Buren countered this by saying: “In case you involve yourself in such a thing one day...make the best building you can do. I think to try to make simple, neutral space would be the worst way.”[31] Fortunately Gehry yielded to these pressures, creating a social centre-piece to the museum characterised by the juxtaposition of form and material. Daylight is introduced through the glazed gaps between the gallery forms, and in the glazed ‘rose-bud’ which forms the vertical culmination of the space, offering constantly changing lighting conditions, the complexity of which are added to by the multiple reflections off the glass scales of stair and elevator forms. Direct and reflected light play against each other on the curved surface of the plaster forms, lending the space a sense of immateriality and transience (Fig.30).

The Definition of the Court

Gehry’s inspiration for the court and for the verticality of the juxtaposed forms came from images of Brancusi’s studio, Sant’Elia’s ‘The New City’, and from Fritz Lang’s film ‘Metropolis’ (Fig.31&32). The result is a space which aspires to be a representation of the ideal modern city, highlighting Gehry’s interest in the city as a collection of sculptural forms: “...the point is that if there is any thread of continuity in my view of ‘the city’ it stems from the fact that I’ve always thought of the city in sculptural terms and been interested in how the forms of the city create patterns of living...the city is itself a sculpture that can be composed and in which relationships can be established.”[32] This interpretation of the city and its relevance to the smaller scale of specific buildings (or building complexes) has revealed itself in many of Gehry’s projects, including the Winton Guest House (1987), the Loyola Law School (1984), and the Schnabel House (1990), all schemes where a comprehensive brief has been broken down into its constituent parts, characteristically resulting in a series of one-room buildings (Fig.33-35): “I was interested in the idea that the house could become a mini-city...I did not have large projects to do, so I used the small projects I had to experiment with urban scale ideas...I broke the house into cells, and each one of them was supposed to appear as an independent entity, as if it was a little village.”[33] In the Winton Guest House, Gehry explored these ideas of fragmentation, drawing inspiration from the paintings of Morandi and from the relationships established between adjacent forms (Fig.36): “I was thinking of buildings in terms of bottles...You put them together and there’s an energy that you don’t get from a bottle alone. They have an effect on each other.”[34] This tension was translated into an architectural composition of varying forms, each characterised by a different material and spatial function.

In Bilbao there is a similar formal play, but also an emphasis upon relationships between scales, from the scale of the city to that of a human. The court is defined as negative space by the basic ‘massing diagram’ of the building which Gehry established early in the competition period as referring to the urban scale of the Puente de la Salve and the surrounding city blocks (Fig.37). This initial design ‘move’ organised the required volume of space into three solid blocks, appearing in the final design as the Temporary Exhibition gallery to the east, the western restaurant, shop, and gallery wing, and the southern wing of rectilinear galleries and administration offices. The fragmentation of these masses into the titanium and stone forms of the galleries - resulting in the distinct profile of the building - follows from the process developed in his earlier works. The architect Robert A. M. Stern describes how “in all his work, Gehry makes the grand gesture and then pulls it apart. He has the great gift to challenge us but not threaten us, to give us order and disorder without tyranny.”[35] At Bilbao, this ‘pulling apart’ of the established order breaks down the ‘massing’ response into pieces relating more to the human scale, adding a texture to the museum where larger buildings act as a backdrop to smaller sculptural elements. This play between scales allows Gehry to define spaces due to their characteristics, and to punctuate the larger forms in order to highlight entrances and sequences. In the court, this allows a freedom in composition which - in a similar way to a sculptor’s studio - can result in chance relationships in the juxtapositions between forms and scales. Thus, the concave curved stone form which defines the entrance to the enormous Temporary Exhibition gallery - with its current exhibition of large-scale Pop Art - encloses a space small enough for the exhibition of line drawings by Giacommetti, Kelly, and Gorky (Fig.38). This small gallery is in turn currently surmounted by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s ‘Soft Shuttle-cock’, which languidly drapes its huge ‘feathers’ over the stone wall and into the court. Such characteristic juxtapositions continually relate the smallest scale - whether of art or of the building - to the urban scale of the building’s spatial distribution, situating the participant in a constant relationship with the city.

“Snakes and Fishes” and the Dynamic of the City

A further relationship between building and city is generated by the dynamic of Gehry’s sculptural language as manifest in the forms of the museum. This language has developed over the years in response to Gehry’s continual quest for an immediacy in his architecture to match that of paintings by artists like Jasper Johns, which influenced his formative works. At Bilbao this search for immediacy has resulted in a work of unprecedented formal freedom, aspiring to capture the fluctuating energies of the site in a frozen moment: “I was just trying to get a sense of movement...a subtle kind of energy. And making a building that has a sense of movement appeals to me, because it knits into the larger fabric of the city...Buildings are a part of the city and it changes; there’s a transient quality.”[36]

The curvilinear shapes of the galleries and the circulation forms in the atrium which capture this movement derive from Gehry’s lifelong obsession with fish: “Sometimes I think snakes and fishes are all there are in the world.”[37] The development of his fish motif and its inherent ‘meanings’ have been well documented in a stream of articles, essays, and interviews published over the past fifteen years. His interest stems from a late-1970’s frustration with Post-Modern classicism and the quotation of historical styles: “I was so furious that people were drawing Greek temples, regurgitating the past, abandoning the present...”[38] The first use of a zoomorphic form in Gehry’s work - the use of a form hundreds of thousands of years old in reaction to the pastiche of Post-Modernism - appears in his entry for the 1980 Chicago Tribune Competition Revisited, a re-run of a 1922 competition for the design of the company’s headquarters. Gehry’s design consisted of a solid concrete skyscraper - a reference to the redundancy of office space in an age of communications and reproduction technologies - metamorphosing into an eagle at the top, a representation of “the power of the press in America and all that.”[39] Soon after this came the project for the Smith House (1981), where Gehry introduced an entrance colonnade consisting of sculptures of animal forms; the eagle reappeared adjacent to an upright fish, and it was from this moment that Gehry began to explore the architectural possibilities of the fish-form. Further projects ensued, such as the 1981 ‘Connections’ collaboration with Richard Serra, a proposal for a Manhattan suspension bridge supported by a huge Gehry fish leaping from the Hudson River, and a canted steel pylon by Serra (Fig.39). Gehry subsequently realised that by removing the head and tail of his fish tower, the resultant curvilinear form approached the level of abstraction of Serra’s rectilinear pylon. On sketches, the fish became a form of personal notation expressing the desire for an as yet undiscovered perfection-based on form and symbolic content-which could perhaps never be fully achieved. In Gehry and Serra’s collaboration on the ‘Prison Folly’ (1983)(Fig.40), a glass fish observatory was juxtaposed with a brick prison in the form of a coiled snake, the contrast reminiscent of Tafuri’s ‘Sphere and the Labyrinth’. The exploration gathered momentum with Gehry’s ‘Fish Lamps’ (1984), ‘Standing Glass Fish’ (1986), and the Kobe ‘Fishdance’ Restaurant (1987), all of which recognised the potential for scaling as a means of covering a complex curvilinear form, whether in (respectively) Formica, glass, or metal chain-link (Fig.41-43). With the galvanised-steel-clad conference room constructed in the 1988 Chiat/Day Temporary Offices in Venice, California, internal and external spatial and sculptural volumetric qualities took precedence over the more realistic original fish representations (Fig.44). This type of experiential sculptural architecture reached a peak with the Vitra International Furniture Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, in 1989, where the abstraction of the fish shape resulted in a play of volumetric and curved planar forms, finished in either white render or zinc cladding (Fig.45). The internal spaces were characterised by their three-dimensional interactions and by the controlled introduction and play of natural light. This building signalled the birth of the language associated with Gehry’s contemporary work, developed in subsequent projects including the American Centre in Paris (1994), the Nationale Nederlanden building in Prague (1995), the Walt Disney Concert Hall project in Los Angeles (project), and of course the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, marking significant points in the evolution of Gehry’s recent architecture, with abstract curved forms assuming their role as the means to the production of an architecture of expressive sculptural and spatial genesis (Fig.46-48).

This language first appears in sketches for the Bilbao Guggenheim as roof light baffles covering the court, reminiscent of those used on the Frederick R. Weisman Museum in Minneapolis (1993)(Fig.49&50). These sail-like forms relate to Gehry’s often quoted analogy between the appearance of dynamic equilibrium which he seeks in his buildings and the impression of movement embodied in the sails of a boat: “When you sail, and you are changing course, the sail is full and then you turn it slowly to the other direction. There is one moment when you are directly facing the wind, the wind is coming equally on both sides of the sail. The split second before catching the wind in the other direction, you get a little bit of ripple in the sail called luff, and the sail folds...it’s very beautiful; you get the sense of movement of the ship in this ripple.”[40] In subsequent sketches and models of Bilbao, the court roof light forms - “sails or curved boat forms going with the flux of the river”[41] - are recognised for their potential to unite the central court with its peripheral galleries, and during the competition process transform into an unfolding ‘rose’. This progression marks a move from the central roof light as too separate and loose to a more constrained figure which, while expressing the autonomy of the court, informs and unites the lower galleries; in turn, its scale - as generated from the height of the bridge - relates these galleries to the scale of the city.

The Event (I)

With the rotational movement of the galleries around the court, and the culmination of this court and of the external composition in the titanium rose, the remaining interstitial spaces are glazed. Gehry explains that “ the breakthrough for me in [the Winton Guest House] was the idea of cracks between the buildings, wedge-shaped cracks that serve to differentiate the parts of the pure forms and suggest that they are complete forms because of this cleavage.”[42] This development of the architecture of the interstice as defining the purity and autonomy of solid forms is carried through on a larger scale in the Bilbao Guggenheim with the fractured glazed walls of the court. These areas of glazing are concentrated in three main places, helping to clarify the main massing diagram of the building, forming the entrance, the slot facing the bridge to the east, and the large opening onto the Nervion River (Fig.51-53). Far from appearing as the standard areas of curtain glazing, these interstitial glazed walls present themselves as fractured planes of glass which seem to collide and bend in relation to the frozen movement of the gallery forms. Their detailing strengthens this tension, with unframed planes of glass oversailing their junctions, almost crude galvanised steel frames, and the apparently simple triangulation of glass panels achieving the curved surfaces.

The building diagram is further clarified on the northern side with the ‘baseball cap’,[43]including a large titanium-clad curved planar ‘visor’ which appears to have been dislodged by the adjacent fluctuating gallery forms (Fig.54). This canopy covers a large stone-paved terrace overlooking a shallow water garden which appears to be a continuation of the Nervion River, the large glazed area behind allowing the internal court to present itself to the city. The court is emblematic of Bilbao’s cultural foundation, and is central to the redevelopment of the river-front area. In the near future it will be possible to walk from the conference centre/concert hall, through a river-front park, past the Guggenheim, and along the river to Calatrava’s Uribitarte pedestrian bridge. The terrace will form a stage to this promenade, the court its transient stage-set backdrop. Currently, only the curved walkway past the Guggenheim has been completed (dividing the Nervion from the Guggenheim’s pool), but the strength of the theatre idea is evident in the building’s seamless integration with the city’s social life. This is epitomised in the role the building plays in the Spanish phenomenon of the early-evening stroll. At around 7p.m. each evening, a queue of well-dressed Bilbaoans snakes its way out of the entrance doors and up the stepped ramp. The primary sequence becomes a street and the court bustles with visitors who, lit from behind, form a three-tiered shadow-theatre to the river-front promenade (Fig.55). This promenade sustains a fluctuating stream of pedestrians who, along with those on the terrace, form a crowd every 30 minutes to watch the spectacle of Yves Klein’s ‘Fire Fountain’ sculpture.[44] Five jets of fire are thrust loudly upward from the Guggenheim’s water garden, forming a warm haze over the surface of the water (Fig.56). It is an astonishing event which brings everything and everyone to a halt, uniting the river-front promenade with the museum’s terrace and court: city and art. Then, after five minutes, the fire is switched off, the crowds disperse, and the teenage roller-bladers resume their endless circling of the museum.

The Guggenheim is already inextricably embedded in the distinctive social and cultural life of Bilbao. However, it is the same architectural qualities that have forged this link which threaten to overpower it. The sculptural architecture that is a result of Gehry’s fusion of the museum with its context, along with the emblematic, theatrical relationship of the building to the river, present an irresistible opportunity for the reduction of the Guggenheim to an iconic image for world-wide consumption via the visual media. Thus it is that the Guggenheim is largely known by its two most often reproduced photographs: the view down the via Iparraguirre and the view across the river to the large window of the court, both images characterised by the unmistakable profile of the unfolding titanium ‘rose’ (Fig.57&58). This image consumption and the emphasis on pictorial identity has positive and negative repercussions on the three parties involved, and will be examined with reference to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s theory of the ‘Culture Industry’, and its relationship to the media event of Bilbao.

3. THE BUILDING AS EXHIBIT

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's 'Culture Industry'

The World Fair tradition of the building as exhibit notably began with Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in 1851. “By 1890 it was thoroughly understood that the appearance of the site itself was the single greatest factor in entertaining the crowds, and hence generating a profit. The site became subject to complex landscaping plans and extraordinary pieces of fantasy architecture in order to delight and amaze...”[45] This tradition has been continued but radically altered with the transition from the isolated exposition site to its integration with the redevelopment of industrial cities, and with the associated shift from a basis in technology and industry to that of finance and economics. These factors demand an architecture of permanence, as opposed to the exposition’s transience: image is primary, but the enormous costs involved in the design and construction of such ‘exhibition’ buildings must be reconciled with the demands of capitalist profit and social and political acceptance. Architecture, under these unavoidable pressures, becomes susceptible to what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have termed the “Culture Industry”, and to its consumption and fetishisation[46] as a commodity. “The works which are the basis of this fetishisation and become the cultural goods experience constitutional changes as a result.”[47]

Adorno and Horkheimer describe the value of a commodity as a combination of exchange value and use value. In a media age dominated by mechanical and technological reproduction, first-hand experience of architecture is overwhelmed by its consumption via the media image. Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum was published in over 700 different newspapers and journals throughout the world before it had ever opened. It is expected to attract 500,000 visitors a year, but this number pales into insignificance in comparison with the number of people ‘consuming’ the building through its photographic image. Such a mode of experience has prompted Fredric Jameson to comment that “I think it is an appetite for photography: what we want to consume today are not the buildings themselves, which you scarcely even recognise as you round the freeway.”[48] This concentration on image is perpetuated in buildings’ reproduction in magazines. Gehry has commented that: “Architectural magazines do not present projects in the context, but like sculptures.”[49] In this separation of the building from its context, the photograph concentrates solely on the aesthetics of the building and, furthermore, any plasticity becomes secondary to this two-dimensional formal composition. Added to this is the notion of “buildings that seem to have been designed for photography,”[50] the architects of which have succumbed entirely to a field dominated by the image. “So it is that in architectural histories and journals, we consume so many photographic images of the classical or modern buildings, coming at length to believe that these are somehow the things themselves.”[51] This image consumption signals the dissolution of the importance of the utilitarian qualities - the use value - of the work. Use value is superseded by pure exchange value: “The cultural commodities of the industry are governed...by the principle of their realisation as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation.”[52] The commodity is then fetishised for its exchange value, and it is this fetish character that is sought in the work.

This fetish character carries potentially serious consequences for architecture when examined in relation to the quest for the identity of a city such as Bilbao, and that of the Basque region. In such a situation governed primarily by an economic profit motive, the fetish character of architecture induces a perpetuation of sameness and standardisation as undercurrents of ‘the new’. Architects names are associated with an image, which in turn is seen as a representative symbol. Meier thus becomes associated with civic pride and the museum, Calatrava with infrastructure and transport terminals and bridges, Foster with progressive concrete, stainless-steel and glass ‘sketches’, and Gehry with adventurous flamboyancy in the form of art galleries. Furthermore, Adorno describes how “each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement.”[53] Expectation with respect to the dehumanised, iconic image that the architect will produce, and the architect’s compliance with this desire, feeds back into the culture industry. “If the real becomes an image insofar as in its particularity it becomes as equivalent to the whole as one Ford car is to all the others of the same range, then the image on the other hand turns into immediate reality.”[54] The fetish character derived from an image-based architecture is therefore strengthened by the quality of the image as of a characteristic trade-mark style, and by the associated propagation of architectural personalities, or brand-names. The following quote by Gail Harrity, Managing Director of the Guggenheim, and Project Manager of the Bilbao venture, expresses the shift in intention from building to image, with respect to the formation of an identity for the multinational Guggenheim Foundation, as Wright created an identity for its home in New York: “The use of great architects is part of a strategy of promotion of art forms that can be shared by a public on a world wide scale. And in making this choice Guggenheim has lost its specific character and joined in with a movement of general interest toward the miracle-working possibilities of architecture. Those institutions that have linked their activities to a sophisticated image in recent years have understood that the architecture of big names can play an extremely important part in the establishment or reinforcement of an international reputation...for a cultural institution of great prestige, the choice of an architect of international fame is a guarantee of success on all fronts, from the more strictly functional one to that of publicity and communication.”[55]

Adorno and Horkheimer argue that this fetishisation of cultural commodities leads to a sacrifice of individuality and the debasing of humanity. Richard Meier is perhaps most characteristic of this phenomenon in the architectural world. “[These works] are transformed into a conglomeration of irruptions which are imposed on the listener by climax and repetition, while the organisation of the whole makes no impression whatsoever.”[56] This quote by Adorno - written in reference to classical music in his essay “On the Fetish Character in Music” - describes exactly the cold emptiness of experiencing Meier’s white-tile architecture and his incessant manipulations of a language consisting solely of planes, rotundi, and blobs (Fig.59). The result is a lack of critical architectural engagement with either the context or the user, and an alienation of producer from consumer: “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour.”[57] This reiterates the point that, within the cultural commodity, capitalist value supersedes social value, and that the masses are not the subjects of the culture industry, but its objects. The culture industry subsumes consciousness in a vicious circle of conformity and “impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves.”[58]

The redevelopment of Bilbao and its use of high-profile architecture to re-establish its identity, signals the return of Bilbao to the centre of the Basque paradox between progress and the conservation of tradition. The dissolution of individuality spoken of by Adorno and Horkheimer, and its replacement with an homogenising "global mediocre civilisation,"[59] would be devastating for the Basque Region, especially at the present time when Euskera is once again being taught in schools, and Basque culture is gradually reinstating itself. In such a situation, ironically regarded as progressive, the maintenance of regional culture and traditions would apparently only be possible through the image; furthermore, it is a standardised image which attempts to express this individuality to the rest of the world. Does this signify an irreconcilability of the aims for the foundation of a city-state and the requirements for global economic participation?

Many residents of Bilbao have expressed disgust that $100million should be spent on an art museum - moreover an American art museum by an American architect - but the money spent is almost insignificant in comparison with the value of the publicity gained. By offering itself to the world's media, Bilbao is intending to encourage foreign investment, establishing a self-perpetuating economic growth. Again, the traditionalists feel threatened by such growth involving multinational companies, viewing it as a destruction of the region's local heritage, and the acceptance of the notion of the 'Global Village'. Parallels can be drawn between the growth of industrialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - and the associated immigration and challenges to identity and values - and the current growth in the financial and commercial sectors of society. A review of the history of nationalism in the Basque Region situates the contemporary plans for Bilbao's regeneration within the current political climate of the area, and illustrates the degree to which politcal extremists will go in their campaign for separation.

Basque Nationalism and the PNV

“[The] process of economic and social modernisation was a challenge to Basque identity, institutions, and values, for it brought industry, major urbanisation, large-scale non-Basque immigration (at least into Vizcaya), and growing atomisation of society...In a general way, nationalism is born of the intersecting of traditionalism and modernisation, and of the need to adjust to and achieve the latter while preserving as much as possible of the former.”[60] In 1895, in an attempt to rejuvenate the traditions of the Basque people, Sabino de Arana y Goiri established the Basque Nationalist Party, known as the PNV.[61] The PNV was founded on belief in the ‘purity’ of the Basque race, and of their differences from the rest of the population of Spain, and indeed the world. Arana’s theory was to be published in a doctrinal compendium of the PNV called “Ami Vasco”, written by Padre Goicoechea Oroquieta in 1906, where it is stated that “eminent anthropologists have demonstrated that the Basque race differs physically from all the others that inhabit the globe. But that physical difference will never be as important, as intimate, as scientific, as that of language and moral character.”[62] Fuelled in part by the myths of heritage of the previous centuries, the main aim of the PVN was to once again attain complete separation of Euskadi (the Basque Land) from Spain. Although the Basque region had never technically been fully united with the Spanish state, the PNV was determined to pre-empt any future unification, which seemed inevitable as industrialisation and immigration continued. Payne has commented that “Scots, Welshmen, and Irishmen enjoyed distinctly less autonomy than did Basques in Spain,”[63] but, while realising this fact, the PNV continued its campaign for foral autonomy, Arana even resorting to attempts to undermine Spain by praising stronger international powers such as Britain.

ETA and Basque Separatist Terrorism

During the 1920's and 30's the nationalists capitalised on the growing class differentiation of Basque society, looking toward the lower middle class, and small town and rural populations for their support. As a consequence, the 1920s became a decade of flowering of the culture of the region: "Basque music, drawing, and art organisations rapidly grew in number, adding colour and liveliness to nearly every aspect of nationalist affairs in years to come."[64] The Spanish Civil War and Franco's destruction of regional identity provoked very serious retaliation from the nationalists, with the formation in 1953 of ETA[65], a radical faction of the PNV determined to re-establish complete foral autonomy. In 1974 extreme members of ETA formed the terrorist group ETA-militar, pledging "to use any means to gain Basque independence" and affirming that "violence is necessary."[66]

With the Basque Region's recognition as an autonomous community under Spanish rule following the death of Franco, and in response to the PNV's apparent complacency in accepting such a compromise, ETA-militar formed its own political party, Herri Batasuna, dedicated to the cause of the restoration of Basque sovereignty. ETA-militar's violent tactics and terrorist campaign reached new heights in the late 1970's and early 80's as they shifted their attention to include operations on Spain's Mediterranean beaches, dissuading much-needed tourism and foreign exchange, and fuelling the industrial decline of the area: "The economic crisis, severe in any case in the Basque country, was exacerbated by ETA's activities, which discouraged investment and terrified industrialists...Those [company heads] who remained often survived only because they agreed to pay the 'revolutionary taxes' which ETA extorted from them."[67]

The terrorism of ETA began to take on a life of its own, and continues to do so today. The Basque paradox between the conservation of foral traditions, and progression and modernisation, is epitomised in the original campaign of the nationalists. However, ETA-militar's view of the destructive, homogenising nature of any foreign investment or interest, and their consequent reliance on violence, have detached them from any real attempts to resolve this paradox.

As a response to the threat of globalisation presented in the form of the Guggenheim, ETA launched a terrorist attack on the museum. In the days leading up to its inauguration, the Guggenheim was closely guarded by the Ertzaintza, the Basque police force. In a routine check on a van unloading pansies for Koons' 'Puppy', José María Agirre - a member of the Ertzaintza - was shot by an ETA gunman; Agirre later died in hospital. In the event, he prevented the potential destruction of the Guggenheim Museum, and the loss of many more lives: the soil holding the pansies for 'Puppy' contained grenades to be detonated during the Guggenheim's opening ceremony involving the King and Queen of Spain.

4. ENGAGEMENT AND PARTICIPATION

Image and Reality

The architecture of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum can be seen as facilitating its own consumption as an image, and yet this passive consumption is at no stage allowed to control - and is potentially subservient to - the concrete reality of the building. This chapter is conceived as an experiential 'reading' of the architecture of the museum, in order to illustrate how Basque regional culture and traditions have become re-moored in - rather than dominated by - the idea of the Guggenheim 'constellation', and how the architecture can be seen as mediating between content and context through the notion of engagement and participation. This reading will involve the gallery sequences which define the space of the court, and rotate around the primary public sequence of movement from the city to the river, and will situate the media image within the complexities and ambiguities of the experiential reality of the Guggenheim.

An Experiential Architecture

The initial external impression of the building is that of oneness, deriving from Gehry's integration of the museum within the dynamic of the site; the materials of the museum are primarily titanium, stone, and glass which, combined with the spatial and formal fluidity, unite the building into an overall composition of frozen movement. This sense of plasticity overwhelms any desire for the consumption of a static image. The external oneness is contrasted internally with a sensation of fragmentation, in which the individual galleries initially appear as separate and distinct with respect to the primary public sequence. They are situated as enclaves approached off the court, and it is only in a meander through these spaces that their inter-dependency and spatial unity becomes clear. This meander is entirely distinct from the more usual hierarchical progression through gallery spaces, and signals a deterritorialisation of art, where the museum becomes completely integrated into the life of the city.[68] This integration is also made possible by the constantly re-stated relationship between the individual galleries and gallery sequences and the public 'room' of the court. An understanding of the galleries and their interactions raises important points with reference to the ambiguity between fragmentation and oneness, and to the link between curators, artists, and architecture. In the following 'reading' the numbers refer to those of the galleries as defined by the museum information leaflet (Fig.60); the Temporary Exhibition gallery will be considered separately.

Gallery 101 exists as an independent space linked to, but dislocated from, the main ground floor area of the court, its autonomy a virtue of a glazed screen and stair. The gallery is double-height, passing vertically behind one of the twisting walkways of the court. It contains an installation by Jenny Holzer, specifically commissioned by the Guggenheim for this first Bilbao exhibition. The piece, 'Untitled', consists of nine vertical LED signboards which form a "clean and straight slice, which shows how irregular and warped the space is."[69] The three curved walls of the gallery are painted a high gloss grey, reflecting the vertically-moving words of the signboards, such that they twist and bend with the gallery space. The vertical slice of text allows movement between the signboards, establishing two spaces with distinct characteristics, one open, the other more closed and secretive. The juxtaposition is heightened by the use of language, Spanish and English on the court side (moving upwards), and Euskera on the more enclosed side (moving down the signboards). Holzer explains that the choice of colour of the diodes was intended to increase this polarising of the space: "Bright red...for the Spanish and English text, and a blue for the Euskera. Red seemed right for Spain, being hot...On the other hand, blue seemed right for the secret text...The Basque language was not taught in the schools and it was not used; it was forbidden during Franco's regime. There has been a movement since the late 1960s to separate the Basque Country from the rest of Spain, and it is a very difficult subject."[70] In Holzer's acknowledgement of and respect for the specifics of the context, these are in turn allowed to inform and strengthen her work. Such a unity between art and architecture is continued in Gallery 103 with the juxtaposition between Richard Long's 'Madrid Stone Circle' and the rectilinearity of the space. Additionally, in its appropriation of space, the piece directs attention in the large room to the paintings by Richter which adorn the walls. The link back to the court consists of a highly irregular residual space - dedicated to the display of the work of Joseph Beuys - defined by the vertical-circulation forms of the court and the curved entrance screen wall. This culminates in a compression of space before re-entering the court, introducing the notion of sequences based around a flow of space which continually expands and contracts, allowing for a variety of experience and interpretation.

There is a corresponding sense of compression on entering Gallery 105 from the court between two stone walls, immediately contrasted with the expanse of the space, dominated by large-scale installations and paintings. The space is currently sub-divided by temporary walls which allow for the required conditions for the display of video installations by Bill Viola. This is facilitated by the absence of windows in the space, an interesting juxtaposition established between the ephemerality of video as a medium and the external appearance of this gallery as a solid stone plinth supporting the upper galleries; such a notion is strengthened by the space's horizontality, linking it in character to Gallery 103. This horizontality is countered by the adjacent court, re-establishing vertical links between floors.

Gallery 201 exists within a plaster form in the court and interacts - as with Jenny Holzer's space - with the walkway above, affording a verticality and a variety of angles of view. This is currently not exploited to a great extent with Cristina Iglesias' lattice box, but the potential is once again present for interpretational site-specific installations. Galleries 202 and 203 consist of physically contrasting spaces and house artworks with vastly differing characteristics. Gallery 202, in the space of one of the curvilinear leaf-like galleries, contains American paintings and sculpture from the 1960s to the present, which take as their premise the questioning of the nature of art and its techniques, processes, materials, and textures. Lying across the centre of the space are Carl André's aluminium tiles. Above this sculpture is a square hole which links the gallery vertically with Gallery 302 (Fig.61). Similarly, this upper gallery houses works which question the perception of art and space, with an exhibition of pieces by Bruce Nauman. Looking down through the square hole, André's sculpture is diagonally framed, and its two-dimensionality results in a surreal distortion of space and distance; only when a visitor walks across the piece to look up does the true scale of the space re-assert itself. The experience is reminiscent of the interactions of space in the Vitra Design Museum (Fig.62), but at Bilbao the interaction is much stronger: the square hole is in complete contrast with the free-flowing gallery form, which, united with the conceptual art, results in a questioning of perception in and of art and architecture. The vertical link also serves to intertwine otherwise independent horizontal gallery sequences, uniting internal and external interactions. Such a verticality is repeated in Gallery 202, where enormous paintings by Francesco Clemente occupy the walls of the vast double-height rectilinear space. This gallery exists within the same orthogonal stone-clad box as the cafe/bar and shop, the combination clarifying the impression of an urban scale block, one of the three which form the basic massing diagram of the building. The verticality of this space interacts with the galleries above, appearing as a solid void, a presence in absence: no views are allowed down into the space, resulting in a form which defines the compressed circulation into and out of Gallery 303. The presence of this form exerts itself in the court, establishing a juxtaposition between orthogonality and curvilinearity, and between city and human scales. The plan indicates that, at high level, this space has the potential to be opened up towards the court, allowing for engagement with the space on two levels (Fig.63). This again highlights as yet unfulfilled potential within the museum for artist's reactions to the architecture with large-scale site-specific installations.

The southernmost block of the urban-scale massing of the building is based around six square conventional galleries; termed the 'stodgy' galleries by the design team, they house early-to-mid-century painting and sculpture, ranging from Picasso and Cubism to Bacon and Abstract Figuratism. Similar to Adorno, Krens argued that "the visceral and pschological experience of the building was like that of an opera...to just have a constantly loud crescendo taking place all the time was too much...there is a logic for galleries being rectilinear. I mean, there's an efficiency about it that has to do with the fact that we walk upright and that the paintings hang on the wall."[71] These galleries are split into two floors of three successive galleries - contained within a stone-clad box - which interact vertically through square incisions cut into the centre of the floors of the upper galleries. At the upper level, these three square openings are surrounded by white plaster walls, affording further hanging space (Fig.64), and are reminiscent of the larger-scale presence of the void in the aforementioned interaction between Galleries 202 and 302. At first floor level these squares appear as deep roof lights; the height of the plaster walls is such that both first and second floor galleries can benefit from the glazed roof lights.

Roof lights appear in the majority of the galleries, serving to orient visitors to the daylight and to the sun, and provide an ambient natural light which is supplemented by artificial lighting. This is apparent in Gallery 209, a double-height space currently dedicated to a retrospective of Anselm Kiefer's paintings and sculptures (Fig.65). The second leaf-like gallery, externally forming the entrance compression, it culminates in an eruption of form surrounding a deep-reveal roof light. The play of light on the curved planes of the gallery varies according to the movement of the participant, strengthening the spatial dynamic of the formal manipulations. The internal space combines with the external composition to create a gallery of individual character, a space which does not detract from the work, but adds vitality to it; the frozen dynamic does not allow the space to become static, resulting in a tension between art and architecture which strengthens both. Such a balance of internal and external space and form derives from Gehry's design process, where a number of models of varying scales from 1:500 to 1:25 are built in order to judge the impact of external compositional changes upon the internal spaces. Combined with Gehry's incessant sketching, these aim to retain the immediacy and freshness of the generating ideas in the finished building: "I'm always looking at eye level, I'm always thinking of what the space is like. And by shifting the scale, it forces me out of the fascination with the model as it is. The reality of the model is a fiction, it's not real, it's only a tool for the final building."[72] This relates back to the idea of the image or two-dimensional representation; during the design process, Gehry prefers to show clients models, and to work between models and sketches, in order to maintain an experiential quality in the work. Gallery 208, the third leaf-like gallery continues this notion of the experiential qualities of the museum with the commission of a painting by Sol LeWitt (Fig.66). This piece capitalises on the curvilinear walls of the gallery to produce painted forms which vary in their perceptual qualities depending on the viewer's position in the gallery and whether at first or second floor level.

The final gallery spaces at second floor level (301 and 304) currently accommodate works by Juan Muñoz and Damien Hirst (Fig.67). These galleries are situated on top of other gallery spaces as well as being defined by curved titanium walls, and are both open to the space of the court, linking quite intimate spaces with the vastness of the court, and to the urban scale of the city. Damien Hirst's work currently occupies the space intended for the display of Picasso's 'Guernica': it would be an apt position, existing as a culmination to the museum experience, uniting art, architecture, and social and political history within the city.

The internal gallery sequences, while initially appearing as independent fragmentary spaces, inter-relate in three dimensions to create an internal coherence related to that of the external composition. This is strengthened by the changing experience of expanding and contracting space within these sequences, which forms a continual spatial flux, utterly related to the external formal and material oneness. This spatial flux constantly refers the participant to the verticality of the court, which forms the internal and external culmination of the museum, serving to maintain the integrity and identity of this public institution within the city. Furthermore, an engagement in the internal relationships between galleries and sequences informs an understanding of the individuality of the external forms, continuing the building's participatory ambiguity between fragmentation and oneness. The building gradually reveals itself through its complexitites and ambiguities, and through its relationship to the art-works on display; an interpretation of the ambiguity between volume and skin apparent in the Temporary Exhibition gallery establishes a starting point for a detailed analysis of this primary gallery space.

Volume and Skin: The Temporary Exhibition Gallery

Crossing the Nervion River on the Puente de la Salve offers an elevated view of the interaction between the ‘upturned boat’ form of the Temporary Exhibition gallery and its three roof light forms, an interaction which highlights the ambiguity between volume and skin in the building. From a distance, looking from either side of the river, the first impression of the Temporary Exhibition gallery - currently housing an exhibition of Pop Art - is of a strong horizontal form inserted underneath the bridge, uniting the two sides of the site (Fig.68&69). The roof light forms appear to twist and leap above the gallery, culminating in three large separate glazed openings facing the bridge.

The purity of this gallery form is broken on its southern side where a section of the wall peels back to reveal a glazed opening (Fig.70). It is this deviation from the established simplicity of form in the Pop Art gallery that signals the ambiguity between whether the building can be read primarily as a composition of forms and volume or a manipulation of planes and skin. It is a significant ambiguity since it represents a quality of the building whereby its architecture constantly seems to undermine its own order, but for its own benefit: rather than a loss of clarity, the museum gains a mysterious strength from its contradictions, such that the whole is very much more than the sum of its parts.

Taking the break in the southern side of this gallery as a starting point for an analysis of this ambiguity, it can be seen that Gehry has taken the idea through into the internal and external details of the building. In dislocating and curving the gallery wall away from its original line, the volume of the gallery is broken down into its constituent thin titanium skins. This is apparent in the overlapping of the limestone base with titanium, and in the seemingly razor-sharp, diagonally-cut plane flanking the glazed wall. This planarity is accentuated by allowing the gallery wall to vertically join the roof light wall at this point, and by repeating the titanium edge-detail in the roof light opening visible from the bridge (Fig.71). In this opening, the titanium sheeting seems to have been bent back on itself, the folded convulsions of the glazing demonstrating the tension between the skins and the volumes they derive from. As the flank wall of this roof light - vertically linked to the lower gallery wall - curves back towards the central court, it again highlights the presence of the massive volume of the Pop Art gallery below, while asserting the roof light's own autonomy. It then proceeds to join upper and lower gallery wall planes at the junction with the glazing of the court, suggesting that these planes are all part of one skin which has been sliced, curved and bent to create the gallery and roof light forms (Fig.72&73).

Returning to the break in the southern side of the Pop Art gallery, it is interesting to trace how the vertical planar link between gallery and roof light manifests itself inside the gallery space (Fig.74). In fact, this vertical link is subverted inside to add to the overall internal impression of the roof light as a distinct spatial form defined by the external shapes of the roof lights, and seen through an incision in the curved roof of the gallery. The separation between the main gallery volume and this free-flowing 'negative form' is strengthened by the appearance of the curved rib-like structure, which acts to define both upper and lower spatial forms.

The zone of the gallery proper is further defined by two of the most dominating works of the Pop Art exhibition, Richard Serra’s ‘Snake’ and Lawrence Weiner’s ‘Reduced’.[73] Serra’s ‘Snake’ consists of three curved sheets of rusted steel, each 4 metres high and 31 metres in length. Together they weigh around 180 tons and can never be moved from the museum. The sculpture sits longitudinally beneath the roof light opening, and establishes an area either side, reducing the scale of the gallery to provide conditions for a variety of size space to accommodate works such as Andy Warhol’s ‘50 Marilyn Monroe’s’. The plates of steel, while curving in relation to one another, slope in opposite directions, creating two spaces with vastly differing characteristics. Where the plates lean toward each other, the space accentuates the horizontality of the gallery, while focusing any small sound onto the participant. The other space - characterised by the divergence of the plates toward the top of the sculpture - muffles sound, and highlights the serenity of the gallery while drawing attention vertically to the interaction of the roof light with the gallery volume.

‘Reduced’ is located on the northern side of Serra’s ‘Snake’, positioned at the only point where the wall of the northernmost roof light vertically adjoins that of the long gallery, mirroring the interaction discussed with respect to the ambiguity between volume and form on the southern edge of the gallery. However, ‘Reduced’ signals the only place in the Pop Art gallery where such an interaction manifests itself both internally and externally, uniting the form and space of the roof light with the gallery. Externally, the appearance is once more of a large sheet of titanium which has been sliced and bent to create the sinuous forms (Fig.75). The largest and most prominent roof light - ending closest to the bridge - reads both as a manipulation of this planar metallic skin and as a strong volumetric presence, again achieving a tension from this apparent contradiction. Inside the gallery, ‘Reduced’ offers an ironic comment on the scale of the gallery, and on so many ‘cut-price’ advertisements that are a characteristic of the contemporary consumer society. The walls of the gallery to either side of the piece are expressed as distinct planes with the use of shadow-gap details at the junction with the exposed concrete floor and with the curved ceiling; ‘Reduced’ continues the horizontal planarity of the gallery wall, at once signalling the point of interaction of roof light and gallery volumes, and ‘reducing’ the purity of this vertical link. These two art-works again highlight the potential for a symbiosis of art and architecture in the museum which can enforce the impact of both through tension, juxtaposition, and contradiction.

Computers and Titanium

The last ten years have signalled an increasing reliance on the power of computers in the design and production of Gehry’s complex buildings, with repercussions on the generation of the curves, their structural implications, construction techniques employed, and on the external-finish scaling modules of the metal sheet and stone cladding most commonly used. The main computer program used in the translation of Gehry’s three-dimensional paper-and-card models into a buildable proposition for the Bilbao Guggenheim was CATIA, a program developed for the French aerospace company Dassault Systems. The significant difference between this and other architectural CAD programs is that it defines three-dimensional forms with surfaces rather than polygons. The hand-made models used in the design process were scanned and digitised using programs designed for laser-guided surgery, and subsequently turned into a continuous curved-surface CATIA model (Fig.76). This allowed for the definition of internal and external titanium and plaster surfaces (control surfaces), the zone between the two accommodating the primary and secondary structure of the forms, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (Fig.77-80). The volume and skin ambiguity is embodied here in the actual design and construction of the building using CATIA: the CATIA model represents forms as surfaces, while the structural system inevitably has to translate the same forms into three-dimensional steel-frame volumes, the two interpretations deriving from the same computer programs.

This computer generated structure and cladding system allowed for a great degree of precision, speed, efficiency, and cost maintenance at all stages of the design, fabrication, and construction procedure. Linked to another computer program, BOCAD - used in the fabrication of steel-work for bridges and high-ways - CATIA was able to produce two-dimensional ‘shop’ manufacturing drawings and also to directly program CNC (computer numerically controlled) machines for the accurate rolling, cutting, and bending of the structural members. A laser-guided location system was employed to alleviate tolerances which ordinarily accumulate during the sequence of construction; combined with the bar-coding of structural members - defining their individual positions based on their curvature and end-cut conditions - this system resulted in a smooth running contract period which kept the building within its $100million budget. This budget was also closely watched during the design process, where the consequences of any slight changes to the forms of the building could be fed directly into the computer and analysed in terms of cost and ease of manufacture. The repetition of the cladding system modules - ’fish-scales’ - was also made possible with CATIA, with the result that 80% of the titanium surface area is covered with four standard panel sizes.

The use of computers on the Bilbao Guggenheim resulted in a structure and cladding system that could be fabricated almost entirely automatically with CNC machines. Gehry has commented on the importance of collaboration in his early architecture, involving the craftsmen who build his buildings: “I wanted to deal with the craft, I wanted to deal with the people who were making the buildings, I wanted to engage them - which is not the way we are trained as architects.”[74] Contradictorily, the continuing development of computer-aided-design in architecture is apparently resulting in the completely opposite condition. In the December 1997 Architectural Review, Annette LeCuyer comments that “Gehry’s office wryly notes that Bilbao was built without any tape measures.”[75] This is an indication of the direction in which such architecture could take the art of building; combined with the potentially fully-automated fabrication process allowed by CATIA, the Bilbao Guggenheim highlights the domination of traditional individual hand-crafts by the computer. Paradoxically, as the computer allows increased freedom in the architect’s formal vocabulary - based on a reading and interpretation of site-specifics - it potentially creates a simultaneous dehumanising global homogeneity of craft, and fabrication and construction techniques.

In this situation it is very interesting that the Italian and Spanish sub-contractors at Bilbao opted to fabricate manually; in fact, the only part of fabrication completely controlled by CNC machines was the precision cutting of the Spanish limestone-cladding used on the rectilinear forms: ironically, even this most sophisticated of techniques was carried out in a tent on site! In the Gehry office statement on the recent Lewis Residence project - a collaboration between Frank Gehry and Philip Johnson on a $40million private house (Fig.81) - it is stated that: “The participation of trades and artisans in the process [of construction] is integral to the form-making envisioned. 3-D computer modelling can provide the means for reintegrating the architect with the trades on this project.”[76] There seems to be a dichotomy between the intentions of the architect and the effects of his actions, in view of the use of new design and manufacturing technologies. Perhaps the Lewis Residence will address this paradox; at Bilbao however, the resistance of the tradesmen to their ultimate domination by high-technologies indicates a common disillusionment with respect to the homogeneity of technique installed through the use of computers.

An examination of the use and appearance of titanium in the Bilbao Guggenheim enters this discussion in more depth. In previous Gehry buildings, the metal cladding has varied from lead-coated copper (University of Toledo Centre for the Visual Arts (1992)), to zinc (Vitra Design Museum (1989)), to milled-finish stainless steel (Frederick R. Weisman Museum (1993))(Fig.82-84). The original material selected for the metal cladding of the Bilbao Guggenheim was lead-coated copper, but was subsequently outlawed as a toxic substance. Gehry explains how the office then analysed stainless steel: “we put coatings on it, we scratched, rubbed, and buffed it, we tried to take away the cold industrial look of the material, and tried to get a material that was more accessible.”[77] During this experimentation, Gehry came across samples of titanium and, in parallel to the analysis of stainless steel, began to explore its potential. Because of its strength, the titanium has to be manipulated during fabrication, near large power sources like the Boulder Dam. Gehry explains: “The rolling of the material was very delicate. It can lead to a dead surface or a wonderful light-receptive one...we asked the fabricator to continue to search for the right mix of oils, acids, rollers, and heat to arrive at the material we wanted.”[78] It was only at the last minute before the contract period began that a drop in the price of Russian titanium allowed the material to be used. It has a history of use in the aerospace industry where strength is important, but had not previously been widely used as a material for the external cladding of buildings. Its strength meant that the titanium sheet was only a third of a millimetre thick, thinner than stainless steel would otherwise have been. This results in a ‘pillowy’ surface where the sheet doesn’t lay flat, which was exploited in its use on the Guggenheim: it is able to play with the light much more effectively than if it were completely taut (Fig.85).

Figures 86 and 87, and 88 and 89 show repeated views of the museum on consecutive days, illustrating how the colour and reflectivity of the titanium is affected by changing weather conditions. On a characteristically grey, misty Bilbao day, the titanium appears as subtle shades of grey, in places seeming to merge with the sky. In contrast, the multitudinous, colourful reflections visible on a clear, sunny day add to the complexity and apparent sense of movement of the forms. Figure 90 shows the southern elevation of the museum on a third day as the sun is setting behind the hills to the west. The yellowy-orange glaze cast across the building and its context accentuates the sense of frozen movement in the sinuous forms, and the museum appears completely at one with its context. These three different lighting conditions demonstrate how the building seems to change its mood according to the weather and the time of day, transformations which continuously act to unite the museum with the specificity of its context.[79] Of course, the other side of this argument is that a contextuality based on a material’s qualities of reflectivity is not site specific, or rather it is site specific, but the site could be anywhere; or everywhere. Such anonymity and global contextuality would apparently contradict the specificity of the museum’s concept and forms; and yet the use of titanium has a direct historical link to the aerospace industries that surround Bilbao, and the construction techniques involved in the metal cladding derive from both aerospace and ship-building industries. In her AR article, LeCuyer concludes that: “By bringing the expertise of other industries to bear upon building construction, Gehry’s work - and Bilbao in particular - has demonstrated how fruitful the marriage with industry can be, not to produce a standardised product but rather a building that is dazzling in the complexity of its craft.”[80] This collaboration between different industries and architecture, and the associated use of titanium, embodies apparent incongruities in the process and product of the Guggenheim, whereby globality is in constant dialogue with the specific qualities of Bilbao and the Basque region.
CONCLUSIONS

The partnership of Gehry, The Guggenheim, and the Basque authorities in the creation of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum raises a number of apparent contradictions and incongruities in the venture; central to these is the recurring Basque paradox between progress and tradition, and the corresponding conflict between global homogeneity and regional individualism. Ultimately, the museum must be seen as embodying both sides of this conflict in a subtle dialogue, which can only be understood through an engagement with its architecture. It is this provocation of engagement and participation which affords the architecture its autonomy and strength. The engagement derives from, and is fuelled by, the complexities and ambiguities of the material, structural, formal, and spatial characteristics of the museum's architecture. These, in turn, are grounded in a physical, social, and cultural contextuality centred around the architectural mediation between the city and the river, and the generation of the museum's spatial distribution and formal fluidity from the dynamic of its urban situation.

The serious threat to this notion of engagement comes from the passive consumption of the image, and the parasitic field of the culture industry. However, by virtue of the confidence and strength of the Guggenheim's architecture, the validity of the image is continually questioned. Those images that are successful and are most often reproduced concentrate on the contextuality of the building, and can even be seen as assisting in the provocation of the desire for engagement with the dynamic of the building. The potential for this type of engagement, and the 'reading' of the architecture by the participant, refers back to Frank Lloyd Wright's intention that the spatial structure of the art museum should affect people's perception of art. Gehry seems to have taken this idea to its ultimate limit; with its intense reciprocal relationship with the social and cultural life of Bilbao, the potential exists for architecture to affect not only the perception, but also the conception of art. The result is a symbiosis between art, architecture, and city, which is grounded within the strong culture and traditions of Bilbao and the Basque Region; architecture becomes central to the integration of progress and the specifics of tradition.

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[1] Marcus Binney, The Times, Oct 18 1997

[2] Philip Johnson, as quoted in the Independent on Sunday, Aug 24 1997

[3] Robert McCrum, The Observer, Oct 12 1997

[4] Ibon Areso, Deputy Mayor in Charge of Planning and the Environment, Bilbao, as quoted in Bilbao 2000, p.18

[5] Stanley G. Payne, Basque Nationalism, p.27

[6] Payne, Basque Nationalism, p.36

[7] Payne, Basque Nationalism, p.78

[8] Ibid., p.94

[9] Ibid., p.105

[10] As quoted in Bilbao 2000, ed. Dennis Sharp, p.14

[11] Ibid., p.16

[12] Josu Ortuendo, Mayor of Bilbao, quoted in Bilbao 2000, p.8

[13] Paul Greehalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, p.7

[14] Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, p.27

[15] Architectural Review, June 1992, p.22

[16] Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, p.23

[17] Ibid., p.27

[18] Umberto Eco, as quoted in Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture, p.204

[19] Paul Greenlaugh, Ephemeral Vistas, p.30

[20] As quoted in ibid., p.134

[21] Thomas Krens, as quoted in the Guggenheim Magazine, Fall 1997, p.8

[22] Thomas Krens, as quoted in van Bruggen, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, p.19

[23] Thomas Krens, as quoted in ibid., p.17

[24] As quoted in Time, November 17th, 1997, p.88

[25] Jeff Koons, as quoted in The Daily Telegraph, Oct 23, 1997

[26] Frank Gehry, as quoted in El Croquis 74/75, p.28

[27] As ‘atrium’ seems like such a derogatory term, this space will be referred to as the ‘court’, using Gehry’s own word. The term ‘court’ is also perfect for the evocation of a large ‘external’ space characterised by its defining buildings.

[28] van Bruggen, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, p.71

[29] Frank Gehry, as quoted in ibid., p.119

[30] Thomas Krens, as quoted in ibid., p.115

[31] Daniel Buren, as quoted in van Bruggen, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, p.115

[32] Frank Gehry, as quoted in ibid., p.72

[33] Frank Gehry, as quoted in El Croquis 74/75, p.26

[34] Frank Gehry, as quoted in van Bruggen, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, p.60

[35] As quoted in van Bruggen, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, p.73

[36] Frank Gehry, as quoted in van Bruggen, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, p.62

[37] Frank Gehry, as quoted in ibid., p.40

[38] Frank Gehry, as quoted in “Call That a Fish Frank?’ by Janet Abrams, Blueprint, September 1988, p.54

[39] Frank Gehry, as quoted in interview with Peter Arnell, in Arnell and Bickford, Frank Gehry: Buildings and Projects, p.xvi

[40] Frank Gehry, as quoted in El Croquis 74/75, p. 31

[41] van Bruggen, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, p.36

[42] Frank Gehry, as quoted in van Bruggen, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, p.60

[43] The term affectionately attributed by the builders and team of architects.

[44] A re-creation of the original 1961 sculpture.

[45] Paul Greenlaugh, Ephemeral Vistas, p.47

[46] "Fetish: a thing evoking irrational devotion or respect." The Concise Oxford Dictionary

[47] Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, p.35

[48] Fredric Jameson, Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p.99

[49] Frank Gehry, as quoted in El Croquis 74/75, p.28

[50] Fredric Jameson, Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p.99

[51] Ibid., p.125

[52] Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, p. 86

[53] Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry,, p.87

[54] Ibid., p.55

[55] Gail Harrity, as quoted in Lotus, May 1995, p.52

[56] Ibid., p.36

[57] Karl Marx, as quoted in Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, p.33

[58] Ibid., p.92

[59] Paul Ricoeur, as quoted in Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism," published in Hal Foster, Postmodern Culture, p.16

[60] Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, p.64

[61] PNV: Partido Nacionalista Vasco

[62] Quoted in Stanley G. Payne, Basque Nationalism, p.88

[63] Payne, Basque Nationalism, p.79

[64] Ibid., p.105

[65] Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna - "Basque Land and Freedom"

[66] Payne, Basque Nationalism, p.243

[67] David Gilmour, The Transformation of Spain, p.226

[68] This is epitomised in the actual museum ticket, a wrist-band which allows you to leave and re-enter the museum throughout the day.

[69] Jenny Holzer, as quoted in the Guggenheim Magazine, Fall 1997, p.40

[70] Jenny Holzer, ibid., p.40

[71] Thomas Krens, as quoted in van Bruggen, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, p.112

[72] Frank Gehry, as quoted in ibid., p.103

[73] Originally completed in 1970.

[74] Frank Gehry, as quoted in AD book, Individual Imagination and Cultural Conservatism, p.41

[75] “Building Bilbao”, Architectural Review, December 1997, p.44

[76] El Croquis 74/75, p. 220

[77] Frank Gehry, as quoted in “Frank Gehry on Titanium”, van Bruggen, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, p.141

[78] Ibid., p.141

[79] Another instance of the titanium’s reflection of the changing conditions of the site is in its fluctuating temperature. With the sun beating down on the southern side of the museum, the surface of the titanium is hot enough to burn: an “accessible” material?!

[80] Annette Lecuyer, Architectural Review, Dec 1997, p.45