Art World The Guggenheim Bilbao, 20 Years Later
The Guggenheim Bilbao, 20 Years Later: How a Museum Transformed a City—and Why the ‘Bilbao Effect’ Has Been Impossible to Replicate.
Frank Gehry may be the architect most associated with Bilbao, but he is not the only one. Stand by the Basque city’s state-of-the-art football stadium—built at a cost of €211 million, half of it from public funds—and look down to the abandoned industrial buildings by the Nervión river, 30 meters below. Zorrotzaurre is the latest area of the former port city to be earmarked for redevelopment, under a master plan by the late British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.
It is two kilometers around the river from Bilbao’s most famous landmark, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and it gives a flavor of how grim the site must have looked before the landmark museum’s arrival. During the 1980s, the city’s industries—iron, steel, and shipbuilding—were in decline. At its worst, unemployment hit 25 percent and—after decades of insurrection—a low point was reached when the Basque paramilitary group ETA murdered three police officers with a car bomb in the city in 1989. The river environment was polluted, blighted by gridlocked traffic and crumbling warehouses.
Today, the Frank Gehry-designed museum is the jewel in Bilbao’s cultural crown, a folded, titanium-clad “ship” nestling low in the water, next to the La Salve roadbridge, on an attractive riverfront walkway. Since it opened in 1997, it has captured local and international imaginations. For the traveling public, it is a spectacular—and Instagramable—contemporary art museum. For politicians, city planners, architects, and museum directors, it represents the ability of cultural institutions to regenerate run-down regions. This week, invited guests, journalists, and regional dignitaries will gather for five days of events to celebrate its opening 20 years ago.
A view of the construction in progress. © FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, 2017.
Yet for all its fame, there are many who ask if so-called the “Bilbao effect” is real, and if so, if it is easily repeatable. Was the Guggenheim Bilbao a unique combination of a project at the right time and in the right place—a great architect and daring museum combined with an unusually forward-looking regional government willing to invest? Have the reasons for its transformative effect been misunderstood, explaining why its model has been frequently imitated but its extraordinary success rarely replicated?
The questions are pertinent in light of the opening next month of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the first of a trio of museums involving international partnerships and striking architecture planned for the United Arab Emirates’s new cultural district Saadiyat Island. (The others are the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Zayed National Museum, which is less obviously branded but has nonetheless had significant input from the British Museum.)
The Beginning of Bilbao
The Guggenheim Bilbao was the result of a partnership between the Guggenheim museum in New York and the governments of the city of Bilbao and the Basque region. The project was masterminded by the Guggenheim’s maverick and controversial director, Thomas Krens, who was looking for ways to expand the museum and stabilize its finances. Along with Bilbao, he would soon propose branches in New York’s SoHo and outposts in Berlin and Los Angeles, though all three were less ambitious than the museum in Spain.
While figures vary, according to a 2007 report by a Basque economist published by the American Association of Museums, the start-up costs for the Bilbao project were almost $230 million (€195 million). Beatriz Plaza, a professor of economics at the University of the Basque Country, broke down the fees: $12.1 million for the architect Frank Gehry, $6.4 million for executive architect IDOM, $100.8 million for construction, $24.7 million to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to run the museum, $9.9 million for the land, $44.5 million to start the collection, and $30.3 million for other operating costs.