Wondering Why the Guggenheim Museum is So Famous?

The Guggenheim Museum, located in Bilbao, Spain, on the banks of the Nervión River, is a mix of intricate, whirling forms and alluring materiality that answers to a complex program and an urban, industrial setting. In fact, the “Bilbao Effect” is the term used to describe the phenomena of a city’s metamorphosis after the creation of a noteworthy piece of architecture. Museum Bilbao, a spectacular structure made of titanium, glass, and limestone was hailed as the most important building of its time.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao building, created by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, is a stunning example of the most innovative 20th-century design. Regarding that Gehry says; “We tried every trick in the book to get some feeling out of it. And it was very frustrating and by accident, I found a small piece of titanium in my shop and I pined it on a telephone pole outside my office and it rained that day. And I looked at the titanium that turned gold and like it does here, and I thought, Oh, my God, that's so beautiful”. The Museum is a landmark architectural structure with a 24,000 m2 footprint, 9,000 of which are set aside for exhibition space. It had more exhibition space than the three Guggenheim collections in New York and Venice combined at that time.

This space serves as a tempting backdrop for the art on display there. There is another architecture inside the building that you can’t actually see. The curator of the museum, Manuel Cirauqui, claims that; the building’s architect, Frank Gehry, has always had a deep passion for dynamic design, so the Guggenheim Museum has also been up-to-date for years. In fact, Cirauqui adds that the concept of a “performer building” is the most accurate definition for this museum. One of the most unique features of Gehry building and one which is not usually found in museums is that when you enter the atrium, you can choose any of the routes through the museums and any of its programs.

Individuals can go directly to the second floor, or to the third, to see the permanent collection. All of this is part of the architecture because it’s the architecture that generates a choreography. You enter the atrium and it’s like a heart that pumps the flow of people in different directions. If we come to the short history of the museum and its construction phase… The Basque government asked the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1991 to help fund the construction of a Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao’s decaying port district, which was previously the city’s main source of revenue.

The museum “appropriately” “became part of a larger redevelopment plan intended to renew and modernize the industrial town.” The Guggenheim Bilbao gained popularity as a tourist destination very quickly after it opened in 1997, bringing tourists from all over the world. On the northern outskirts of the city center is the riverside location. The river is to the north, a road and railroad run to the south, and the Salve Bridge’s concrete construction is to the east. The building “circulates and extrudes around the Salve Bridge” to “make a tangible physical connection with the city,” “creates a curved riverside promenade,” and “forms a generous new public plaza on the south side of the site where the city grid ends.”

While the building’s metallic surface may appear almost flowery from above, it actually resembles a boat from the ground up, bringing to mind the port of Bilbao’s former industrial life. The inside, however, “is built around a sizable, light-filled atrium with views of the Bilbao estuary and the surrounding Basque country hills.” Here, it is important to open a parenthesis about Gehry the architect of the museum. Because, he did not define himself as being involved in an architectural movement, but the museum was defined as one of the most remarkable examples of Deconstructivism in the first years of its establishment.

It is said that Deconstructivism was merely an oppositional movement to the practice of Post-Modern Architecture. And the distinguished architect Gehry has spent more than 50 years upending the basic definition of design in architecture. From the renowned Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Gehry has often demonstrated the power that results from skillfully executed whimsical design. You should make a decision about that after looking at his famous works such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Neuer Zollhof complex and Vitra Design Museum in Germany, or the Dancing House in Prague. Well, leaving aside what an architectural movement means, do you wonder what processes the cladding of this building was actually made through? Beige limestone slabs that are 1.97 inches or 5 cm thick and were carved from the Huéscar quarries near Granada are used to cover the building’s foundation. Because the walls have been properly treated to shield the interior from the effects of the sun, the building is clear. To keep light from harming the exposed pieces, the windows’ glass has also been coated. On a framework of galvanized steel, it is covered in titanium plates that are organized in scales.

The 33,000 titanium plates that make up the museum’s external skin were employed to replace the hazardous materials copper and lead. To develop a material that would survive the heat and inclement weather while retaining its character, numerous testing with various materials have been conducted. The most effective method of treating titanium samples was discovered during this study phase. During the conceptual design phase of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao project, architects at Gehry Partners started using Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA software in the fall of 1993 to digitize and model the museum’s facade.

By creating a 3D model that depicts the various tensions and enabling the values of many structural elements of the museum to be determined, this software essentially analyzes the stresses to which materials are exposed point by point. Each piece is exclusive to its location,  determined by the CATIA software. In addition to its architectural differences, the Guggenheim Museum has a very important place with the cultural transformation it has brought to the city. The city was changed by the museum this is referred to as the “Bilbao effect.” And twenty years later, the Museum is still challenging perceptions of the relationships between art and architecture.