47 GUGGENHEIM

MUSEUM BILBAO
Frank O. Gehry

Richard M. Sommer

Frank O. Gehry, Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain, 1997.*

The Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume IV, Twentieth-Century Architecture.

Edited by David Leatherbarrow and Alexander Eisenschmidt.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
A SECULAR CATHEDRAL OF ART

In the middle of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright famously designed a
museum for Solomon R. Guggenheim, the main volume of which was comprised
of a continuous, spiraling, nautilus-like space. First commissioned in 1943, Wright’s
Guggenheim was not completed until 1959, following the architect’s death. The
curving walls were seen by critics as inhospitable to traditional ways of displaying
art, especially paintings, the primary medium of Guggenheim’s founding collection
of non-objective art. Wright saw architecture as a medium equal to art, and as one
that should play an active role in the museum experience. The Guggenheim proj-
ect pitted the visionary architect against New York City and the art world of mid-
century America.
In 1960, a year after the Guggenheim Museum opened, Claus Oldenburg
mounted his improvisational art-performance, “The Street,” in a borrowed space
on New York’s Bowery. Among the messages scrawled on the walls of Oldenburg’s
installation was: “Frank Lloyd Wright tried to eliminate painting and we are getting
even by eliminating architecture.” Oldenburg’s friend, Jim Dine, added “The
House” to Oldenburg’s “Street,” and a year later, Oldenburg rounded out this trip-
tych of capitalist city ur-forms by mounting “The Store.” Oldenburg’s art defiantly
reclaimed the artist’s rhetorical superiority in renewing the avant-garde project of
collapsing art and life. When he stated in his manifesto from the same period, “I am
for an art that embroils itself with everyday crap and still comes out on top,” Old-
enburg was voicing a sentiment that was to animate much of the important art of
the 1960s.1 Oldenburg also set out a conceptual challenge that Frank Gehry later
took up for architecture.2

Warehouses for Art and Spectacle

A half-century after the original Guggenheim project was initiated, Thomas Krens
was hired to renew the Guggenheim Foundation’s mission. Krens set out to collect
important works of minimalist and post-minimalist art from the 1960s and 1970s.
He pursued a global program of building and blockbuster exhibitions that could
capture the expanded size, physicality, and diversity of media associated with post-
war art. In an age when museums, at least in North America, came to depend more
and more on attendance, fees, and private philanthropy to survive, museum-
visiting was undergoing a change from an expression of cultivated connoisseurship
to experiences of popular entertainment, touristic pleasure, sociability, and the con-
sumption of goods and services. Although it had never been particularly useful for
mounting exhibitions, Krens understood the powerful potential of Wright’s icon
 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 3

on Manhattan’s Museum Mile as a spectacle for engaging this new reality, and
sought to reproduce that potential in a more contemporary manner elsewhere.
Earlier, Krens had developed the idea of repurposing a large, recently abandoned
nearby factory, the Sprague Electric Plant in North Adams, Massachusetts, to
become the largest contemporary art museum in the world. The museum would
be funded with state redevelopment subsidies and private donations of cash and
art. He continued to pursue this idea after he was hired by the Guggenheim Foun-
dation. Although the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA)
was eventually achieved in Adams by others, it became the model for creating a
satellite Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain (there was already the Peggy Guggenheim
Gallery in Venice, Italy). Like Mass MOCA, the Bilbao project was first conceived
to reoccupy an old building in a dying industrial town, leverage public and private
investment, and provide vast spaces for exhibitions impossible to imagine in the
confined quarters of New York City. In June 1991, Frank Gehry, Coop Himmel-
blau, and Arata Isozaki were invited to submit schemes and compete for the proj-
ect. Gehry was selected.
By his own telling, Gehry, with Krens, convinced officials in Bilbao to move the
project from a nineteenth-century building within an historic quarter to a prominent
geographic knuckle in the town on the south bank of the Nervion River. The
museum was intended to take advantage of its adjacencies to the Old Town Hall,
the University of Deusto, and the city’s existing Museum of Fine Arts, and serve
as the first stage in the transformation of a former riverfront industrial complex. Juan
Ignacio Vidarte, the Director of the Guggenheim Bilbao, told Gehry they wanted a
building that would transform the city by giving it a new visual identity, in the man-
ner of the Sydney Opera House. Gehry, ever the demure architect, promised to try.3
The Nervion River is not Sydney Harbor, but the Puento de Salve Bridge, which is
the main connection across the river from Bilbao’s nineteenth-century city center to
the surrounding areas, passes over the eastern portion of the site, and Gehry’s design
is composed to encompass the bridge, and function as a new gate to the city.

Gehry’s “Artsploitation” Architecture

In retrospect, Gehry might seem like an obvious choice for this 250,000 ft2, $100 m
assignment. Nevertheless, there is a no small irony in Bilbao Guggenheim’s
deserved status as a masterwork of recent architectural history. Mastery of archi-
tecture as a craft, and applying such craft to the production of cultural icons, had
not been Gehry’s forte or chosen path. His first and fundamental innovation was
bringing artistry to mundane assignments, seeing the latent possibilities of a cheap-
scape postwar America, and in so doing, drawing architecture out of ordinary pro-
jects where it might be least expected.
Gehry’s engagement with the art and architecture scene in Los Angeles, and
with the particular built geography of Southern California, beginning in the late
4 The Present Generation

1950s, is critical to understanding his later success at Bilbao and beyond. He first
practiced with Victor Gruen Associates. Gruen, a Viennese émigré to Los Angeles,
who had developed a large, successful practice based in large part on his concept of
the shopping mall; particularly, the role that the new mall could play in the North
American suburb, akin to what town centers had been in European countries.4
The architectural sleights of hand needed to make effective retail architecture
with temporary materials and limited budgets, and the ersatz urbanism of the
Gruen mall formulae are both foundational to the innovations associated with
Gehry’s work beginning in the 1970s. Even earlier, in work done soon after Gehry
established his own practice in 1962, one can find the mining of cheap materials for
sensual and symbolic effects and the use of theatrical effects associated with shop-
ping environments.5 Projects for the Joseph Magnin Department Stores (1968–69),
the O’Neil Hay Barn (1968), and other more explicitly experimental early projects
such as the Danziger Studio and Residence (1964–65), reveal similar traits during
this first phase of his career. They were influenced by the artists and gallery owners
with whom Gehry forged relationships in the 1960s: Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, Ed
Kienholz, Ed Moses, and later in the 1980s, Richard Serra and Claes Oldenburg. All
of these artists were turning a new eye to the seeming detritus of modern industrial
landscapes such as Los Angeles, repurposing common materials and reconsidering
the broader landscape and environment as aesthetic phenomena.
Gehry’s work has been taken very seriously by architects and critics since at least
1978, after the house he transformed for his family in Santa Monica was widely
published. In the late 1970s Claes Oldenburg, with whom Gehry previously had
only limited contact, and his collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen, whom Gehry
had never met, paid a visit to the Santa Monica house. They quickly recognized
Gehry’s craft in rendering aspects of Oldenburg’s own earlier performances in a
more extensive, immersive, and sustained manner than any single work of art
might do. They subsequently collaborated on various projects, including the
Chiat/Day “binoculars” Building in Venice, California (1985–91).6
That Gehry had to build his creative breakthrough for himself, in the manner of
a modern artist (that is, without a client) is significant. A self-conscious attempt to
jettison the commercial basis of his earlier practice, undertaken at the risk of losing
important clients like the mall developer Rouse Corporation, Gehry’s house was a
provocation that seemingly flew in the face of architecture’s conservative tenden-
cies and declared Gehry’s creative ambitions as an architect.
The gambit worked. His house was the subject of serious theoretical speculation
by critics such as Frederick Jameson, who saw in it a palimpsest of old and new, an
incomplete structure, and a representation of the postmodern condition in which
time, space, and material allusion had become both indeterminate and open to inter-
pretation and appropriation in ways only latent in modern space.7 The period that
began with the creation and broad reception of Gehry’s Santa Monica House and
ended with Guggenheim, Bilbao is arguably the most speculative and fertile of
Gehry’s long career. He realized that in the expanded territory encompassed by
 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 5

contemporary practice (parking structures–shopping malls–housing–furniture), all

of the commercial icons and industrial, utilitarian materials that his artist friends
had sought to appropriate were already at his disposal. He simply but ingeniously
retrieved “the everyday” as a conscious subject of and objective reference for
architecture.
Gehry was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1989 (before Bilbao was built), based on
a 25-year record of experimental work, primarily located in his adopted home base
in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, it was the project for the Guggenheim Museum at
Bilbao, Spain, and others that Bilbao enabled, including the Disney Concert Hall,
that provided a whole new scale of endeavor and the circumstances to build in an
unprecedented way, such that these projects propelled Gehry to international
renown at an advanced stage in his career.
Gehry’s Bilbao incorporates almost all the ideas that propelled Gehry’s prior
work, but in many instances exceeds them, both in its degree of formal integration,
and in its technical execution. Gehry has never been an explicit polemicist. Taking a
page from the contemporary artist’s playbook, Gehry’s statements about his work
are always positioned to place the work outside of judgment and “theory” by refus-
ing any classification, leaving theoretical explanations to others. Nonetheless, since
he achieved prominence in the 1970s, specific themes and theoretical tropes have
been conveyed through his many statements and lectures accompanying his pro-
jects, as well as the interviews with the critics and historians who have been his inter-
locutors over the years. An understanding of Guggenheim Bilbao as an architectural
performance, and how it reset the possibilities for the projects that followed is best
achieved by seeing it through the lens of the specific tropes, procedures, and meth-
ods that Gehry and his colleagues have already, to some extent, posited.

Exploding the Bubble

Gehry’s approach to designing Bilbao followed a well-established procedure in his
office that had begun with his sketching and fiddling with bricolage-like models.
A series of organizing models by others in the office followed:

In our office, we tend to make three models before we start building: a small one,
which is purely contextual, a bigger one to work out the shapes of the building, and
then a final interior model, which provides us with the opportunity to simultaneously
develop shapes of the building and the interior. Hence, I do not simply jam the inter-
iors in at the end of whatever is left over.8

Gehry’s deceptively simple way of describing his working method belies the
complex way Bilbao’s massive program is broken into many discreet parts, arrayed
on the site, and then recombined into an unlikely ensemble. Gehry’s method of
organizing buildings brings together two established design techniques. The first,
6 The Present Generation

the bubble diagram, a technique associated with late modernism; and the second,
village-making (my term), a technique associated with postmodernism, following
planning movements such as Townscape.
The bubble diagram is a graphic means of diagramming discreet building func-
tions into sets of differently weighted bubbles (in graphic terms, circles or ovals).
The proximity of one bubble to another and lines drawn between the bubbles are
used to create an index of needed relationships, and spatial adjacencies. Such a dia-
gram is essentially a reification of the functionalist approach to architecture, devel-
oped between the world wars, wherein scientifically derived use requirements are
taken as the beginning and primary basis of any architectural composition. Gehry
made the bubble diagram three-dimensional and loosened its functional corset:
entry atrium here, public auditorium there, long gallery next to that, square gallery
on top, retail, and restaurant in-between. In Gehry’s 3-D process, discreet program
parts are put in containers, and given the attributes of single-volume buildings.9
Starting in the 1950s many architects, including Louis Kahn and Philip Johnson,
experimented with breaking down buildings into discreet pavilions. Later, the
retrenchment from the large scale utopian planning, and critique of the idea that
buildings can perform as megastructures, is most associated with Jane Jacobs,
Charles Moore, and Venturi and Scott-Brown in the United States, and Leon Krier
and Aldo Rossi in Europe, all of whom aggressively advocated for the planning of
cities in small, incremental building blocks. Frank Gehry fully absorbed this attitude
in the 1980s. He retrospectively spoke about the disappointment he felt at the outset
of his career with the prospect of planning cities, after an ill-fated attempt to study
city planning at Harvard. He had concluded, early on, that if he was going to effect
change at the scale of the city, he could only do so at the scale of a building, or even a
room.10 Through a diverse set of projects beginning in the late 1970s, Gehry experi-
mented with breaking down buildings into many parts, the most notable of which
was the Loyola Law School, Los Angeles (1978), and the project for a Tract House
(1982), a scheme later achieved in various built projects such as the Fishdance Res-
taurant, Kobe, Japan (1985–87) and the Schnabel Residence (1986–89).
By the time of Bilbao, Gehry had distilled his bubble diagram programming,
small-building-block massing approach to an extent where he could skillfully dis-
aggregate a complex program into a set of different containers, and then warp and
fragment the containers. Where necessary, one container could be collided or
collapsed into the next. With this method, the interior volumes for galleries,
offices, auditoria, services, and so on, could be maintained as somewhat neutral,
geometrically simple spaces that faithfully attended to their functional require-
ments. The real architectural action occurred at the points of intersection between
the discreet volumes, especially in the cracks, seams, and splines between the
volumes, where the various cladding systems on the exterior leaked through
the joints of crudely assembled wooden boxes (or, more literally, the glue-gun
joints in the rough architectural models Gehry’s office is known for). This work-
ing of the margins happened at many scales, and across many intersections in the
 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 7

Bilbao project, including the main atrium, the largest manifestation of this inter-
stitial architecture.
Gehry had originally conceived of the atrium as a rectilinear space that would
accommodate art on its walls, but was persuaded by the client to develop a more
highly sculpted space in the spirit of Wright’s Guggenheim in New York City.11 As
built, the atrium rehearses the swirling, centrifugal space of Wright’s Guggenheim
and collects all of the fragmented volumes of the Bilbao complex, assembling them
like pendants on a necklace. Instead of being unified, and closing in on itself, as in
New York, the Bilbao atrium acts a portal and continual space of reference for the
museum’s visitors both through the circulation it affords, and by having the built
fragments of the rest of the complex on display act as material teller, or index, to the
vaults of art on display in the attached spaces.

The Baroque Turn

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown posed the ugly and ordinary “Decorated
Shed” as a rhetorical, baroque foil to the overly synthetic “Duck” of modernism.12
In the early 1970s the Decorated Shed was a watershed concept with a serious impli-
cations for architecture understood as a form of city building, but one that Venturi
and Scott Brown nevertheless never managed to mine fully in their own work. Yet
early on, in Complexity and Contradiction, Venturi, alluding to the baroque,
described an architecture of “things in things, and things behind things.” With a
Decorated Shed, the exterior surface and iconography of a building is disengaged
from the shape and functional requirements of the interior. The exterior, as deco-
ration, is freed to manage its material, scalar relationships and implicit responsibil-
ities to the surrounding context, while the interior houses the explicit program.
Works such as Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontana, from the Seventeenth
century forward, have been understood, in retrospect, to embody this idea.
The equation of sculptural exterior decoration and functional interior shed can
be found in almost every project from Gehry’s mature period, including the
Guggenheim, Bilbao. Instead of rendering the decoration flat and over-determining
its symbolism, as was implied by Venturi and Scott Brown’s focus on signage,
Gehry conjures a three-dimension decoration that alternately acts as camouflage,
decoy, or sign. The strategy has the effect of diversifying the project’s overall
image, and a local effect of unifying discreet volumes and sections of a building
complex. The main function of the highly wrought metal, masonry, and glass clad-
ding that constitutes the primarily exterior decoration at Bilbao is to dissimulate the
perfunctory nature of the loosely stacked, plaster-lined, functional boxes that con-
stitute a majority of the project’s spaces.
Understood as three-dimensional decorated sheds, Gehry’s sculpturally exuberant
urban compositions constitute a new baroque. Many adjectives and modifiers have
been attempted to describe the character of Gehry’s architecture, expressionistic being
8 The Present Generation

the most common. Yet baroque is the most correct and evolved historical concept –
as opposed to style – to understand the Guggenheim Bilbao. At the advent of
modernism, the art historian Heinrich Wolfflin defined the baroque as “movement
imported into mass,” and a technique which repudiated the pure, geometric classicism
of Renaissance art. In more recent scholarship and theoretical speculation, from
Walter Benjamin’s equations of allegory and baroque theatre to Gilles Deleuze’s phi-
losophy of the fold, the baroque is understood as prefiguring the temporally volatile,
layered nature of modern consciousness (and therefore space). Gehry’s architecture is
baroque not just because of its lyrical quality and its circular, Crustacean-like geome-
tries; it is baroque because its carved, decorated surfaces unpeel from the basic
volumes of the building and dynamically shape space, both inside and out, in ways
that exceed the rectilinear logic of so much of the western, classical canon.
As the Decorated Shed analogy brings to light, the utility of separating the inte-
rior of a building and shaping it to meet specific requirements, and composing the
exterior envelope to meet its surroundings, is one of the technical developments
of baroque urbanism from the eighteenth century. In its preindustrial manifesta-
tion, the baroque was a means to sustain a continuous, or at least the appearance
of a continuous architecture, across many discreet buildings and spaces. The
city Gehry is engaged with, whether it be Los Angeles, or Bilbao, Spain, is no
longer the genteel fabric of blocks, churches, and squares of the (projected)
baroque city, but is rather a post-industrial landscape of infrastructural detritus –
the concrete and steel spaghetti of rail and automobile geographies, and incon-
gruous building stock.
Baroque was originally a term of derision for irregular and ill-formed artistic
works and a precursor to the romantic elevation of the altern and the vulgar. This
is the tradition in which Gehry must be understood. The plastic qualities and inde-
terminate sculptural abstractions of buildings like Guggenheim Bilbao are baroque
in effect (and picturesque in sensibility) because they create a verisimilitude of vis-
ual continuity with their unevenly formed surroundings in ways few works of
modern architecture ever could.

The Vulgate, Digitally Remastered

Gehry had built buildings with dynamic, baroque-like forms before Guggenheim
Bilbao, but never at the scale, intensity, or level of precision found there. Before the
Bilbao phase of his career, Gehry’s process had involved working between lyrical
sketches and a series of models and drawings. In this highly iterative process sculp-
tural gestures were transcribed into buildable shapes and rendered in raw assem-
blies of common material. While this still occurred with the development of the
Bilbao design, the building, or at least its exterior shape, looks remarkably similar
to the early models produced for the competition. Achieving a more direct trans-
lation from design-gesture to built form, and animating the material of a building at
 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 9

this level of exuberance, required bringing new technical innovations to bear from
the emerging field of computation-based modeling.
The technology, or more precisely the digital tool Gehry and his team used to
develop the design for Bilbao, was adapted from software originally developed for
the aerospace industry, called by the acronym CATIA (Computer Aided Three-
Dimensional Interactive Application). First developed in France by the company
Dassault Systèmes to aide the design and fabrication the Mirage fighter jet, CATIA
was later applied to other complex, engineering-intensive products such as auto-
mobiles and ships. Gehry’s office was the first to fully adapt CATIA to architecture.
They first used CATIA to develop the Fish Sculpture, built as a folly-like structure
for the Olympics in Barcelona, 1992. CATIA was transformative for Gehry because
it allows complex shapes to be digitally modeled, modified, and tested, such that
they can be dimensioned, styled, and subdivided into a series of parts that can then
be fabricated by machines, directly from a digital file.
Over the past two decades there has been a revolution in the use of digital mod-
eling in architecture. Early applications tended to repeat the rational, tectonic tradi-
tion of modernism because the technology was largely seen as simply a replacement
for traditional drafting tools and construction documents. Gehry upturned this tra-
dition by starting with a shape that did not have a type of construction or material
cladding associated with it. His formal grammar allows an indeterminate logic of
construction. CATIA was revolutionary because it allowed Gehry’s office to reverse
engineer his abstract, idiosyncratic forms into buildable shapes. The key factor was
that the CATIA process involved a laser gun that Gehry’s office could use to scan the
handmade wood, plastic, and paper models that were cut, cast, and molded, as they
had always been in Gehry’s shop. Model scans made by the laser gun allowed shapes
to be translated into a vector-based digital drawings. From these computer drawings,
accurate 3-D models could be developed to visualize large assemblies, integrate
incongruous aspects of a project, rule complex surfaces, test various material appli-
cations, and ultimately fabricate the project at a level of craft not imaginable before.
Gehry had started his career with the conviction that pursuing architecture in the
refined, craft tradition of Europe had become impossible in the commercial context
of North America. He would instead make something artful with cheap, off-the-shelf
technology such a balloon frames, plywood, chain-link, and sliding glass doors. Even
with the design of Bilbao, Gehry’s mode of ideation and way of drawing and mod-
eling did not change. He does not personally use a computer. Nevertheless, as an
animator can put an artist’s sketches in motion, 3-D software enabled Gehry to
engage a new mode of architectural production and achieve a new mastery.13
With Bilbao Guggenheim we see the convergence of two realities that changed
Gehry’s architecture. First, technology linking the visualization of dynamic form to
its fabrication developed to a point where the fantastical forms of influential early archi-
tectural avant-gardes such as the Russian constructivists could now be achieved. Sec-
ond, Gehry’s status as an architect was elevated to an extent where he was enabled to
make a museum into a cultural monument. Monuments require an air of permanence,
10 The Present Generation

a mastery of material, and a steadfastness of purpose. Therein lies the irony alluded to
above: Gehry’s architecture once owed it power to its temporary, incomplete, quo-
tidian nature, and allusions. His penchant for creating fragmentary structures that
were raw and unfinished gave his projects the accessible, empathic quality associated
with forms that reveal the way they are made. Again, in this he was following the
influence of 1960s art, not only the craftsman-cum-minimalists of the American West
Coast such as Robert Irwin, but also Oldenburg.
Writ large, refined in temperament, and industrially crafted at the Guggenheim
Bilbao, Gehry’s architecture, once dynamic and pleasurably vulgar, ran the risk of
becoming ossified. Whether due to the high expectations that had come with suc-
cess, or a desire to master the execution, as opposed to the conception of his pro-
jects, the work produced by Gehry and his office in the years after Bilbao is often
formulaic. Given how many prominent architects have refined and used the same
methods and vocabulary over and over again, it may seem unfair to hold Gehry to a
different standard of originality than others operating on the world stage. The dif-
ference is that the language and rhetoric of Gehry’s architecture is one of sponta-
neity, openness to circumstance, and freedom of expression, and these attributes
do not tend to survive repetition particularly well.

Democratic Form

Forster: “You used the term ‘open ended’ in several ways, particularly in terms of
expanded vistas… [referring to the work of David Hockney]”
Gehry: “… I think that the idea of open-ended structure in painting or music suggested
openness to interpretation and a freer way of dealing with the world. It suggested
a way of dealing with the environment that to me was somehow easier for democ-
racy to adapt to than traditional western classicism.”14

What is lost if, with Guggenheim Bilbao, Gehry’s work transforms from some-
thing once liminal to something more reified and concrete in character?
In many cases, this would merely be a sign of progress and the expected mat-
uration of a creative project over time. Yet, Gehry and the critics who have pro-
pelled his work continue to use terms such as open-ended, incomplete, pluralist,
provisional, nonconforming, and individualistic to describe the qualities he has
aspired to and achieved in his architecture. Persisting in this rhetoric has utility.
In their capacity to embody certain liberal democratic values closely associated
with modern America, these terms have a political dimension that has been instru-
mental to the reception and success of Gehry’s work.
Not since Frank Lloyd Wright has an architect so strongly positioned his work as
democratic in spirit and American in character. Wright had claimed his work as a
unique expression of the self-reliant Jeffersonian strain of American democracy.
 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 11

His architecture combined an arts and crafts influenced appeal to truth in construc-
tion and material expression, with the counter-classical and temporal aesthetics of
Japanese art. Wright argued for the disaggregation of the rent-based mercantile city
into a horizontally oriented (prairie) urbanism. To replace the commercial city,
Wright reimagined the agrarian grid, from which his asymmetrical, in-the-nature-
of-materials architecture was to rise as a living ornament to American democracy.
Gehry’s earliest independent works, such as the Steeves House, Brentwood Cal-
ifornia (1958–59), were decisively Wrightian, and he acknowledges the degree to
which a Wright-influenced interest in Japanese architecture and Japanese aesthetics
was prevalent at the University of Southern California during his formative archi-
tectural studies there. Nevertheless, Wright’s influence was waning by the late
1950s. His puritanical, Victorian attitude toward the popular, commercial world
did not ring true with a new generation contending with the reality of postwar
America. This generation was as apt to confront or co-opt the everyday reality
of the existing city as abandon it.
Thus, in comparison to Wright, Gehry’s appeal to democratic values is less
idealistic, less drawn from nineteenth-century utopias of social reform, and less
suspicious of the cosmopolitan artifice of modern life. While professing to be
left-leaning on a personal level, Gehry’s professional identity is that of the artist
whose self-expression can transcend ideology. Yet, his cultural references are
the counterculture of the 1960s, at least those aspects of it that crossed over into
the art world; especially the tune-in, turn-on and drop-out, and let-it-all-hang-out
ethos. The picture of a VW Beetle propped up on Gehry’s corrugated cardboard
Easy Edges chair designs from the early 1970s, his first design to achieve any wide-
spread attention prior to his house, is perhaps the most indicative of his identifica-
tion with the spirit of that time.
Marshall McLuhan argued that democratic media should be “cool rather than
hot,” that is, unfinished and open-ended to induce transformation through interac-
tion, rather than coercively manipulate by means of closed narratives meant for
whole consumption. McLuhan’s view on the role of art is also instructive for under-
standing both Gehry’s formation and the conflation of art, architecture, and spec-
tacle in his work. McLuhan took the position that the “machine turned life into an
art form” and argued that that proliferation of technology created a whole new
series of environments, wherein the arts function as “anti-environments” or “coun-
ter environments.” This is a curious revision of the role of the avant-garde, one in
which art functions as an early alarm or radar system for a technological society
gone awry.15
To some extent the culture of “Happenings” and pop art (including
Oldenburg’s) can be seen as presaging both the transformation of the art
museum, as an institution, and the role of architects, such as Gehry, in creating
the new spaces of art. Drawing on John Cage’s art of chance, this art privileged
the sensuous and temporal situation of art, effecting a collapse of the traditional
boundaries between visual art, music, and theatre.16 An open-ended, bohemian
12 The Present Generation

Gesamtkunstwerk, the Happening offered a highly differentiated space of

engagement in an urbanizing world that was becoming ever more bereft of ale-
atory social encounters and sensual pleasure.17 Just as the right to public space
and assembly for the many became enshrined in law, at least in the Western
world, racial tensions, suburbanization, class stratifications, and purely market
driven patterns of development eroded the cosmopolitan, democratic potential
of the urban condition.
Gehry’s abandonment of the social project of planning forced him to conceive
each building as if it were a self-contained Happening. He shares this approach with
many of the leading architects of his generation, including Rem Koolhaas. For these
architects, each building must summon its own provisional city (essentially a
walled village) that by necessity need not connect with or depend on its neighbors
and surroundings.
By the late 1980s, the urban theorist Mike Davis found Gehry’s approach to the
city emblematic of a disturbing trend. Identifying a “fortress” mentality behind
Gehry’s vaunted everyday realism, Davis saw in Gehry’s artfulness, a false
consciousness:

[Gehry’s] strongest suit is his straightforward exploitation of rough urban environ-

ments, and the explicit incorporation of their harshest edges and detritus as powerful
representational elements. Affectionately described by colleagues as an “old socialist”
or “street-fighter with a heart,” Gehry makes little pretense at architectural reform-
ism or “design for democracy.” He boasts instead of trying “to make the best with the
reality of things.” With sometimes chilling effect, his work clarifies the underlying
relations of repression, surveillance, and exclusion that characterize the fragmented
landscape of Los Angeles.18

Where others have seen in Gehry’s chain-link fences, dumb-boxes, and blank
walls a benign verisimilitude with the modern city, Davis’ neo-Marxist analysis sees
Gehry’s slumming representations as a false bunker-like front and Trojan horse for
the exertion of social privilege and the forces of gentrification within the dispos-
sessed spaces of the contemporary city. Of course, Davis is not raising a new prob-
lem for architecture; in the service of the church, state, and market, architecture has
always represented the interests of the powerful. What has changed is that under
the aegis of modern democracy, many expect architecture, through both its formal
and informal performances, to play a more liberating role.
The Happening was an attempt to stage a space of authentic encounter, a
momentary liberation from the established norms of everyday practice, where,
in Kaprow’s words “ritual, magic and life” could supplant the western tradition
of mimesis and aesthetic reflection. What we find in the subsequent half-century
of partnerships between artists and cultural entities such as museums is the enshrin-
ing of this idea in a quasi religious space. Architecture plays an essential role in the
secular rituals associated with this new art, which often requires a scale of space,
 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 13

and technological and administrative support well beyond the picture galleries of
the past. The extreme of this is Gehry’s design for the Experience Music Project in
Seattle, built just after Bilbao in 2000, in which visitors get to “interact” by, for
example, play-acting guitar licks with a virtual Jimi Hendrix, and where Gehry’s
architecture plays a contributing role in the commodification of creative freedom,
artistic play, and alternative culture as brand-identity clichés. What was once an
insurgent practice of counter-culture art becomes a pragmatic way of coping with
the difficulties of sustaining authentic modes of public life in societies where the
promise of freedom of access and xenophobia play equal parts in making every-
place a kind of ghetto.

Conclusion: The Secular Cathedral

How then do we evaluate the Guggenheim Bilbao’s success as a public work of

architecture? Soon after it was completed in 1997 it had entirely transformed
the prospects of what had been a little known and declining industrial city. The
museum has continued to attract close to one million visitors per year, with typ-
ically more than 50% of these visitors being from abroad. The economic impact of
this influx to the city and region has been carefully calculated and often touted:
Guggenheim Bilbao is a commercial colossus generating an estimated $150 m in
revenue from museum related visits and businesses in a typical year.
Granted, to celebrate its 700-year anniversary, Bilbao made other infrastructural,
public realm investments in which architecture also played a role, including a transpor-
tation hub by Michael Wilford and Associates, new Metro stations designed by Foster
and Associates, and an airport and footbridge by Santiago Calatrava. Nevertheless, peo-
ple do not travel to Bilbao to see the Metro stations. The prospect that a singularly
important work of public architecture, crafted by a visionary architect, could change
the fortunes of a city is now enshrined in the phrase “Bilbao Effect.” Reminiscent of
cathedral building during the medieval period, the desire to replicate the Bilbao effect
has influenced many municipalities and institutions to commission singular works of
architecture (often, but not always, art museums) by internationally renowned archi-
tects in hopes of putting their own city or city district on a global map of cultural trade
and tourism. The Guggenheim Foundation has made several attempts, so far unsuc-
cessful, to spread the Bilbao effect, with major international design competitions, and
projects designed by Gehry and Rem Koolhaas/OMA, among others.19
Is Gehry’s achievement at Bilbao simply a matter of good timing, of architecture
giving institutional form to ideas propelled by vanguard art? Much has been made
about the closeness of Gehry’s architecture to the themes, techniques, and motiva-
tions of postwar art. That Thomas Krens sought to build a museum for the
Guggenheim Foundation in Bilbao whose spirit, and permanent collections draw
on the avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s, and found an architect who has
explored similar territory was fortuitous. After the 1960s, a conceptual repositioning
14 The Present Generation

of the sites and media through which art could be explored only further expanded the
avenues and areas of art’s influence, which could include, but was not limited to,
“everyday” experience. Architecture, on the other hand, by virtue of the expectation
that it should provide stable and accommodating shelter has always been bound up,
to some degree, in the everyday. The extents and limits of architecture’s environ-
mental effects and zones of influence cannot be conceptually or physically circum-
scribed in the way the “art” can. This is why equating architecture with the everyday
does not provoke the shock achieved when art partakes in the same subversion: for
architecture there is always the risk of a tautological bind, and with this a loss of imag-
ination and a capitulation to the status quo. To both avoid this risk and overcome its
weakness as a profession, serious architecture has typically eschewed the ordinary,
and has instead striven to establish its autonomy as both an art form and a mode of
building. As an aesthetic and moral posture, high modernism had much to offer this
identity crisis. In particular, modernism’s assumptions of originality, internal consist-
ency and austerity of form and its concomitant rejection of the decorative, the con-
tingent, the discursive, and the hybrid helped create the illusion of a cultural power
that in fact continues to elude the architectural profession.
Gehry’s singularity as an architect is not only in his formidable skill in composing
the very material of architecture, but also in his ability to opportunistically adopt,
when necessary, the political identity, modes of creative production, and ideolog-
ical independence of the artist, to the practice of architecture. If, with Gehry’s
house in Santa Monica we had a case where life masqueraded as art, with an insti-
tutional project such as Guggenheim Bilbao we may have returned to a more tra-
ditional arrangement where art imitates, or more optimistically, animates life. In
either case, the artist (as opposed to the architect) has the freedom to seduce by
eroticizing the everyday or mainstreaming the exotic – effecting through poetic
means a change in an audience’s conception of reality.
In venues provided by various institutions artists are involved in creating a spec-
ulative space, capable of capturing the multiple interests of prospective audiences.
The speculative space of art, wherever it sits on the spectrum between the com-
mercial and the sacred, is construed by desires and concepts, and may resemble
other “ordinary” spaces, but is decidedly not perceived through an ordinary lens.
This ambiguity of being rooted in the world, both geographically and culturally,
but at the same time establishing a quasi-art-religious space apart, is precisely what
gives Guggenheim Bilbao the power to inspire an unprecedented pilgrimage of
tourists seeking an authentic experience.
The seeking of a space apart is also what links Gehry and the Guggenheim
Bilbao to Wright and the first Guggenheim in Manhattan. Architects and the
work they produce can never be fully extricated from their time, place and
the cultural forces that shape them. Yet, architectural projects take time to gestate
and build. Once built, they linger in time. A utopian reformer rooted in the nine-
teenth century, Wright wished to replace the existing city with an organic, prairie
architecture. A pragmatic liberal contending with the eclipse of progressive pol-
itics in postwar America, Gehry accepts things “as they are” and exploits
 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 15

architecture’s ability to create value in cities built on speculation. Thus, Wright’s

Guggenheim ignores the existing city and the Gehry’s props it up. Both created
an urban specter, and in that void conjured a compelling architectural vision of
engagement.

Notes

* Image credit: Xauxa (Håkan Svensson) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creative-

commons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
1. Claes Oldenburg, “I Am for an Art…,” in American Artists on Art, from 1940 to 1980, ed.
Ellen H. Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 98.
2. Aspects of this chapter expand upon and paraphrase my discussion of Frank Gehry’s
Tract House Project, 1982, and Robert Venturi’s Pearson House Project, 1957, in
Richard M. Sommer, “Four Stops Along and Architecture of Post War America,” in
Perspecta 32, Resurfacing Modernism, ed. Ann Marie Brennan, Nahum Goodenow,
and Brendan D. Moran (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2001), 76–89.
3. Barbara Isenberg, “The Bilbao Effect,” in Conversations with Frank Gehry (New York,
Knopf, 2009), 132–46.
4. See Jeffery Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
5. For an expansive catalogue and discussion of Gehry’s early work, see Bickford Arnell,
Frank Gehry Buildings & Projects (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).
6. Cristina Bechtler, ed., with Kunsthaus Bregenz, “Conversation between Frank O.
Gehry and Kurt W. Forster with Cristina Bechtler,” in Art and Architecture in Discussion:
Frank O. Gehry/Kurt W. Forster (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 1999), 67–70.
7. Fredric Jameson, “Architecture: Spatial Equivalents in the World System,” in Postmod-
ernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press [1999]
2001), 107–30.
8. Frank Gehry, “Since I’m so Democratic, I Accept Conformists: A Lecture on Recent
Work,” in Frank O. Gehry: Individual Imagination and Cultural Conservatism, ed. Charles
Jencks (London: Academy Editions Ltd, 1995), 49–50.
9. Ibid., 49–50.
10. See interview: “Frank Gehry and Peter Arnell: A conversation (No I’m an Architect)” in
Frank Gehry: Building and Projects, ed. Frank O. Gehry; Peter Arnell, Ted Bickford, and
Germano Celant (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 14.
11. Gehry, Individual Imagination, 49.
12. See Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown, “Ugly and Ordinary
Architecture, or the Decorated Shed” in Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbol-
ism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).
13. Gehry, Individual Imagination, 50.
14. Bechtler, “Conversation,” 18–19.
15. For aspects of Gehry’s association with Louis Kahn, Marshall McLuhan, and Robert
Venturi/Denise Scott Brown, I am indebted to Luciano Rubino, ed., Frank O. Gehry
Special, trans. Susanna Marsch and Eddy Levy (Roma: Edizioni Kappa, 1984), 29–35,
perhaps the best publication on Gehry’s early phases.
16 The Present Generation

16. Paraphrased from Sommer, “Four Stops Along,” 84; see also: Allan Kaprow, Assem-
blage, Environments and Happenings (New York: Abrams, 1966).
17. Sommer, “Four Stops Along,” 84.
18. Mike Davis, “Fortress Los Angeles,” in City of Quartz (London: Verso 1990), 221–64.
19. Just after Bilbao opened, Guggenheim commissioned Gehry and his office to design a
massive waterfront museum and arts complex roughly three times the size of Bilbao on
Manhattan’s East River, a project that was canceled soon after the attack on the World
Trade Center in 2001. In 2001 Guggenheim built two related venues in Las Vegas, both
designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA: the Guggenheim Las Vegas, which closed after two
years, and the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, which closed after six years (the com-
mercial churn of Las Vegas would appear to surpass and supersede even the most new
and clever works of the vanguard). Finally, a Gehry designed Guggenheim Museum on
Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, almost twice the size of Bilbao, has been underway for
several years, alongside satellites of other major Western museums and institutions,
such as the Louvre. Unfortunately, the Abu Dhabi project has been plagued by
controversies surrounding the abuse of human rights of foreign workers on which
the construction industry in the U.A.E. depends.

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