The miracle of Bilbao - The Guggenheim Museum
Museums are important cultural institutions, symbols of power, stature, and sophistication. Designed by the North American architect Frank Gehry, this unique Museum built on a 32,500 square meter site in the center of Bilbao. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a modern and contemporary art museum. The permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao basically includes works by the most prominent artists of the last forty years of this century.
On one side it runs down to the waterside of the Nervión River, 16 meters below the level of the rest of the city of Bilbao. One end is pierced through by the huge Puente de La Salve, one of the main access routes into the city. The Guggenheim Muse um Bilbao is a collection of interconnected blocks housing galleries, an auditorium, a restaurant, a museum store and administrative offices. These buildings have as their central focus a single architectural composition. With its towering roof, which is reminiscent of a metallic flower, the museum will enliven the riverfront and serve as a spectacular gateway to the city. The Guggenheim Bilbao attracted 2 million people in its first year of existence.
The building itself is an extraordinary combination of interconnecting shapes. The mathematical complexity is built with the sinuous stone, glass, and titanium curves. The museum designed with the aid of computers. The glass walls were made and installed to protect the works of art from heat and radiation. Eleven thousand square meters of exhibition space are distributed in 19 galleries. Inside the gallery spaces are comprised of three different types-for permanent collections, for temporary exhibits - elongated rectangular space extending toward the Puente de la Slave Bridge and seven distinct galleries of unique spatial quality for selected living artists. Large-scale artworks are housed in an exceptional 30 meter wide, 130 meter long gallery free of columns and with flooring specially prepared to cope with the comings and going of visitors and museum staff, as well as the sheer weight of the works on display there.
Undoubtedly, this simplifies the tour inside the Museum while the atrium. Its in center and the walkways that link one gallery with another, showing different perspectives of the exhibitional spaces. As visitors enter the Museum they learn that under the external complex appearance of the architectural shapes, clear world where it is easy to find one’s way around. The museum’s permanent collection concerns 20th century art, traditional paintings and sculptures are often in a minority compared to installations and electronic forms.
This not-derivative architecture gives us insight into the possibilities of the human imagination.
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