`The story of Bilbao reads like a fairy tale. The proud port city in the Basque region of northern Spain had survived fires, floods, and civil war in its seven hundred years. But by 1990 the once-handsome city had fallen on hard times. Shipyards sat idle; steel mills, silent.

Faced with widespread unemployment and irate citizens, the city fathers and government officials put their heads together and came up with a bold scheme. Their master plan includeda first-class museum, so original that it would attract worldwide attention and rescue their town from its slow decline. But they couldnt do it alone.

They called on Thomas Krens, the powerful head of the Guggenheim Museum, headquartered in New York City. A new Guggenheim in Spain appealed to Krens. To continue the museum's tradition of great architecture, he announced a competition.

Three architects from Austria, Japan, and the United States were invited to submit proposals. In 1991 Frank Gehry and his wife, Berta, who speaks fluent Spanish, went to Bilbao. Enthusiastic about the city but not the site, Gehry and Krens offered a suggestion. Instead of redoing a warehouse in the town's old historic district, what about a new site across town ona bend in the Nervi\'en River? The tall bridge spanning the river would cross through the museum and become an integral part of the composition.

True to form, Gehry submitted a radical design, a model he constructed of sheets of paper rolled and taped by hand, like a sculptor molding clay. Everyone knew his plan went beyond all expectations. The big question was, Could it be built?

The secret weapon was a three-dimensional imaging computer program developed by the French aerospace industry to design fighter planes, CATIA. Gehry already had used CATIA for parts of several other buildings, including Fred and Ginger in Prague. But for Bilbao he took full advantage of the computer's modeling possibilities.

He says, “Many artists over time have thought about movement, talked about flow. The only thing that holds back or restricts shape is technology and money—because it costs! In our culture technology has evolved so that it's cheaper to build a rectangular building. But if you figure out a way to make technology work for you, you can explore curved shapes and make them possible at competitive costs. You can do this because of the computer?”

Gehry doesn't use the computer himself. “I can't stand to look at it for more than four minutes.” He designs in drawings and then on physical models of wood, paper, and cloth. So what does CATIA do? The program can turn any wild shape or volume into working drawings. It also talks to other computers—for example, at steel mills and stone quarries—and gives them exact dimensions. With the help of CATIA, Gehry's office made 565 working drawings and hundreds of models in only two years. Without CATIA it would have taken decades.

Gehry chose titanium, a strong, silvery metal used for missiles, to be the skin of the structure. Even with a budget of one hundred million dollars, the cost was too high. Then someone must have waved a magic wand. The Russians dumped tons of titanium on the market, and the surplus briefly caused the price to drop. It was affordable.

It took four years to build the museum, and when the titanium was installed on the roof, the workers on the top level could see panoramic views of the city and the building blossoming like silver petals beneath them.

For Frank Gehry, who had studied art before he became an architect, Bilbao was his own fantasy come true. “To be at the bend of a working river, connecting the urban fabric of a fairly dense city with a place for modern art, is my idea of heaven.” From chain link to titanium: It might seem as if he had come a long way from his bungalow in Santa Monica. But what looks like a giant leap is actually an evolution. You find his fish motif appearing here and there throughout the museum. The metal cladding, seen in his own house and in many other Gehry buildings, reaches its peak in the titanium walls of Bilbao. Jutting skylights, glass partitions, towers, the cluster of connected spaces: They’re all there but grander, more monumental. He’s done it before, Frank admits. “You can’t escape your own language.”

What about the city of Bilbao? In 1997 its museum opened to rave reviews. AN INSTANT LANDMARK! SPAIN-ISH CONQUEST! BASQUE-ING IN GLORY! read the headlines.

The city hoped it would attract a half million visitors the first year. Instead more than a million came to marvel at the titanium-clad miracle. It announced the arrival of a new era in architecture, and people wanted to see it for themselves. The streets swarmed with tourists. Bright shops, restaurants, and hotels opened to serve them. The city fathers had asked Frank Gehry for a building that would become a destination, a wonder of the world.

like the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids. As it happens in all fairy tales, their wish—with plenty of help from talent and hard work—came true.

What follows the tremendous success of the Guggenheim in Bilbao? Where does Frank Gehry go from here? Is the pressure on to do something bigger and better? He has won more than one hundred prestigious awards for his architecture, and his desk is piled high with requests from people who want another Bilbao. “The good thing is that my part in Bilbao was over five years ago. So before everyone got excited about it, !'d merrily gone on my way doing what I always did. I'm way beyond Bilbao.”

Asked how he reacts to being a celebrity, Gehry says, “The famous thing gets in the way of creativity, especially if a lot of people come in and tell you how great you are and you're scared of this thing you're working on.' However, he admits feeling pleased when people on the streets of Bilbao come up and give him a hug.

At seventy Gehry finds his creativity is speeding up. His shapes are becoming looser, flowing even more freely, as if the swelling forms fly, float, and dance from the sheer exuberance of his imagination. “I'm trying to get more liquid, to put feeling and passion and emotion into my buildings through motion.”

Middle School English Assessment

English Assessment

Submitting...