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If the 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 for the Sydney Opera House has a building so dramatically imposed itself on a city. On the river edge of a town planned in terms of axial Beaux Arts order, architect Gehry, 68, has inserted a startlingly irregular building that defies every convention of axiality, including the right angle, of which there doesn't appear to be one, either inside his structure or out.
The structure is huge--at some 250,000 sq. ft., with 112,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, twice as big as the uptown and downtown New York Guggenheims put together. And it is by far the most completely realized of Gehry's public buildings. On his native ground, this most original of American architects has had terrible luck: witness the endless and (to Los Angeles, in a civic sense) humiliating delays involved in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
But the 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.
Here was a rust-belt city, once a capital of Spanish industry, still rich but now decaying and plagued by the murderous Basque-separatist terrorism of the E.T.A. It was eager to remake itself as a tourist center. It needed a solid emblem of peace and cultural openness. So the Guggenheim deal, though costly, was very attractive.
But 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 indeed evoke a vast metal ship, full of compound curves, run aground--a sort of art-ark. "To be at the bend of a working river intersected by a large bridge," Gehry wrote at an early stage of the design, "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."