Word: bilbao
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...mark the climax of the age of American museum expansion. One is in Los Angeles and opens officially in December--though small flotillas of previewing VIPS have been trawling through it for the past few months. The other, already open, is under American management but is set in Bilbao, in the Basque region of northern Spain. Neither is likely to have any architectural rivals in what is left of the 20th century, or for a good slice of the early 21st...
...Angeles. The Getty is the most expensive arts complex and by some calculations the most expensive building in American history. Large expectations ride on it as both a cultural institution and an emblematic focus for Los Angeles itself. Meanwhile, Frank Gehry's $100 million Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao opened two weeks ago. Built and financed by the Basque regional government, it is essentially a franchise: a major step in the effort by Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York City, to parlay his museum into an international network of satellites exhibiting art from a common...
...Getty is a clear, benign and somewhat remote presence in coastal Los Angeles, the Guggenheim Museum has hit Bilbao with the force of an architectural meteorite. No question that it's there. You are walking through the pleasantly undistinguished, mainly 19th century streets of its quarter; you turn a corner, and--pow!--an apparition appears in glass and half-shiny silver (titanium, actually), massively undulating, something that seems at first glance to have been dropped from another cultural world between the gray townscape and the green hills that rise behind it. Not since Joern Utzon's 1973 design...
...Basque regional government in Bilbao really wanted the Guggenheim there; it backed Gehry's design to the hilt and poured money into the venture. It provided a free 249,000-sq.-ft. site on a bend in the Nervion, the river that passes through Bilbao; the basic construction cost of $100 million; $50 million more for new acquisitions; a $20 million advisory fee to the Guggenheim; and $12 million a year in operating costs. Hands up, anyone who can imagine an American city doing that entirely with public money...
...Gehry was astute in framing his design. He didn't want it to defer to the town architecture, but he did want it to chime with other aspects of Bilbao, particularly its industrial landscape: to commemorate its former power and presence. All along the Nervion are shipbuilding yards, loading docks, cranes, massive obsolete warehouses--the kind of context that not only Gehry but also some of the artists he is closest to, like the sculptor Richard Serra, love. Disregarded, blue-collar beauty. The rusty pecs of Basque industrial capitalism. Seen from the far side of the river, the museum does...