Genius Realized - Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim

Bilbao, Spain


If you are fortunate enough to have spiritual people in your life, and you get to that place in your friendships where they express the wonder which is in their hearts, you hear things like: “You must experience the magic of New York at Christmas...”  “Next year in Jerusalem...”  and “Have you been to Mecca?...”

In the high tech circles where I have spent my career, you also hear reverential questions filled with wonder at science, technology, and that special magic where they blend with design: “Have you ridden in a Google self-driving car?...” “Have you experienced a Steve Jobs talk?”  “Have you played with the new iPhone?”  “Have you seen Rod Brook’s new Baxter robot?”

In architecture, only one work in modern times seems to evoke such wonder and reverence.  Only one question comes up time and again when you talk to architecture and design enthusiasts: “Have you been to Bilbao?”

This is the hardest blog post that Rachel and I have written so far.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure I could write it; I wasn’t sure that my words could do justice to what our eyes have seen, and to the experience of our senses.

Wow.

In a world where perfection is rarely realized, this place is almost as close as you can get. 

How do you describe a feeling of great beauty, of genius realized, and of visual wonder, on paper?  How do you describe a painting when your only brushes are words?

The only way I know how is to break it down, and to use words to illustrate the photos we have taken.  Let’s start with the setting.

Setting and Context

In my summer 2012 meeting with Frank Gehry and his wonderful partners Brian Aamoth and Meaghan Lloyd, he talked a lot about CONTEXT, about the place where a work lives, and about how the context and setting of a building is as important to its design as the architect’s defining vision.

As we talked about design for a monument to celebrate America’s next 250 years, I heard how difficult it is to design something beautiful and iconic in isolation, without knowing first where exactly it will be built.

New York

I began to understand that feeling of context as I watched the Freedom Tower in New York City rise from the ashes of our country’s greatest modern tragedy.  I felt it more when we experienced the sublime context of Gehry’s buildings in the extraordinary Dusseldorf Harbor, a harbor transformed in the last 10-15 years by vision, modernism and artistry.  I felt both the challenge and the success of context in Tenerife, experiencing both extraordinary context and inadequate context depending on which side of Calatrava’s Tenerife Concert Hall you stood.

Dusseldorf

Tenerife

But at Bilbao, I finally understood what a marvelous context can bring to a work.

I wonder what the setting looked like before the Guggenheim, because the building and surrounding structures feel as if they have organically emerged there from river and the earth, like some primordial surrealistic sea monster.

The setting is terrific. 

A bridge crossing the estuary of Bilbao flows straight into the Guggenheim, cutting a part of the structure visibly in two, and providing a vantage point from which to view the work.  The bridge is the main entrance to the city of Bilbao, and the first experience of this beautiful, artistic, seaside city is the twisting, playful Guggenheim, beckoning a visitor into the city with verve and charm.  The bridge itself is playful and fun, anchored by an enormous red H, a supporting structure for the bridge painted in a glowing red, drawing the eye as you cross into Bilbao, and offering a brightly colored contrast to the earth-toned and metal-toned structures all around.  This use of BRIGHT COLOR AS A BRILLIANTLY CONTRASTING ELEMENT WITH MATTE EARTH AND METAL TONES plays marvelously with the Guggenheim Museum and the river below it.

The Guggenheim itself occupies a river bank in Bilbao.  Across the river from the structure runs a beautiful pedestrian walkway, and a set of old world European buildings with 17th/18th century charm. 

Along the river side the structure, Gehry has constructed an arching walkway, sweeping out into the river from the Guggenheim, and offering a stunning approach.  The city side of the structure stands across from a set of shops and hotels with cafes on their roofs for taking in the Guggenheim from the air.  One end of the structure is anchored by the gateway bridge.  The other end is anchored by a charming park, with playgrounds and benches inviting relaxation.

Bridge.  Park.  Curved riverside walkway.  Old World Europe buildings and pedestrian walkway across the river.  Buildings with rooftop cafes on one flank.  These elements of CONTEXT offer AN ALMOST ENDLESS ARRAY OF VISTAS AND VANTAGE POINTS, each revealing a different aspect of the structure.  From some vantage points, like climbing the spiraling stairs to the bridge, you seem to actually walk inside the skeleton of the structure.  From other vantage points, like the cafes and the bridgeway itself, you seem to tower over the structure, watching the sun play on the matte metal wrapping the building like rays of sun on water. 

The array of vantage points invites the walker to come play with the building.  The building REVEALS DIFFERENT CHARACTER UP CLOSE AND AT DISTANCE.  The effect is one of constant discovery, and it draws you in, coaxes you to linger, and CREATES A SENSE OF WONDER AND DISCOVERY AROUND EACH TWIST AND TURN.

 

Two aspects of this setting really stand out in how they enable Frank Gehry’s design to work so well:

• The setting, with its multiple clean sight lines and differences in elevation and vantage point, allows the use of distance and point of view as key elements in the consumer’s experience of the building.

• The setting allows the building to reveal different character at different times of day by playing with surrounding elements of light, river water, color, and reflection. 

Light, Water, and Change

Years ago, on one of many business and pleasure trips to Australia, I visited Ayers Rock  (Uluru) in Australia, the enormous orange rock in the center of the Australian subcontinent.  One of the remarkable things about Ayers Rock is that this oblong, distinctly orange rock  - some two miles in length and 1100 feet in height - looks very different throughout the day, as the sunlight light hits the rock and plays games with its texture and hue.

So it is at Bilbao.

Just as Frank Gehry discovered as he nailed pieces of titanium and stainless steel to the telephone poles outside his office in LA many years ago, the light plays off the metal sheeting on the building in amazing ways, changing color, texture, and feel as the sun rises, crests, and sets.

The sides reflect the bright red of the bridge cutting through the structure, the glistening grey of the water below, and the yellows and oranges of the waning sun.

Shapes, Color, and Reflections

Gehry makes full use of the natural elements of color available in the Guggenheim’s setting - the orange and yellow light of the sun as it rises and sets over the structure, the gunmetal grey river water, the Blue sky, the earth-toned buildings across the way.

To this mix of sunlight and earth tones, Gehry adds:

• White fog, bathing the grey concrete walkway in an eerie mist, like the Moors of Scotland on a dewy morning,

• Matte and glossy metal in all varieties of curves and shapes, allowing for play and reflection which draws the eye and lifts the spirit

 

• The glistening red bridge H, which reflects in wonderful ways on both the river and the Guggenheim,

• Sparkling glass, offering a view into the museum,

• The greenery of the parkland, providing an inviting setting to sit, linger, and watch

Dr. Suess and the Building

The building itself is playful and fun, as if Dr. Suess himself (or turn-of-the-century German architect Hermann Finsterlein) came to the river to play.  An almost endless array of imagined images creep into the mind as we walk around the structure - waves, a ship, a pile of clay, an mound of whipped cream...

Feels like good, clean fun.

Whimsey and Menace

In Dusseldorf, Germany, we were captivated by the use of play and whimsey to turn a dull grey harbor into an inviting, amusing, warm place to walk and explore.

At the Guggenheim Bilbao, Frank Gehry also approaches the design with a spirit of play, inviting the consumer inside the joke, letting Rachel and I feel the sense of child-like play at work in the structure.

He slices the structure, inviting us inside its skeleton:

He builds an improbable towering red H over the structure, creating great fun as the H beckons from below, anchors from above, and reflects on metal and water:


But we also find something new here, a sense of play cloaked in menace.  As young children toddle down the walkway alongside the Guggenheim, they routinely jump, as jets of fire unexpectedly fly out of the reflecting pool alongside the structure, creating a mesmerizing feeling, a disturbing sound, and a fascinating reflected light.

 

And finally, there is the most menacing structure of all at the Guggenheim, the element of the museum which is probably it’s single most photographed feature.  It is ridiculous.  It is creepy.  It is improbable.  It is completely out of its context.  But it works.  It is an enormous monstrous spider, caught in mid stride walking along the riverside plaza.  Two parts menace, one art visual anchor, the spider menaces pedestrians, frames the river, draws the eye from water to building, provides an eerie silhouette against the evening sky, and despite its creepy gangly structure (which should be horrifying to an arachnophobe like me), draws you into the plaza and alongside the monument.

If in your wildest dreams, you imagine that you could design a building as beautiful as the Guggenheim Bilbao, the spider is the element which brings that dream to an end.  It is the element which elevates the Guggenheim Bilbao form ordinary Magic - itself so small accomplishment - to genius.  It is the element which connects the metal, water, fire, and glass of the building and setting to something organic, without breaking the flowing improbable, impossible structure of the place.  It is the element which connects the Guggenheim to man, and it is genius.

Crumpled Paper and Dancing Metal

The City of Bilbao understands the work of genius they got from Frank Gehry, and honors him among their artists and heros in whimsical ways.  On a nearby rotary, not far from the Guggenheim, sit sculptures of Gehry’s self-confessed inspiration for his flowing and impossibly organic forms - crumpled pieces of paper, this time sculpted of metal.  A fitting and funny tribute that made us smile.

I had thought the comparison of Gehry structures to crumpled pieces of paper was a bit of a Hollywood joke, as illustrated in this Simpson’s clip:

Not sure what language this is in, but the joke is still just as funny:



But it turns out to be fact.  Part of the process Gehry puts his apprentices through is crumpling up pieces of paper, then drawing and building structural models out of what the wads look like.  Matt Groening was right.  Go figure.

The Magic Light of Bilbao

One of the things that Rachel and I have learned during our journey is that in architectural photography, magic is constructed out of light.

Photography is about many things - setting, arrangement, framing, the geometry of an image, the emotional resonance of a picture.   But as much as anything else, it is about light.  Too much light can ruin a shot, as heavy shadows create an image partly overexposed and partly in near darkness.  Light can play havoc with depth of field, shadow, contrast, exposure, and texture.  Many a seemingly beautiful portrait shot becomes a shadowy mess, as you look to balance depth of field, dark shaded areas, and light.  And many photographs of great architecture become mundane tourist snapshots if a building is backlit or over-saturated with light.

There is a time which occurs twice a day which filmmakers and photographers call “Magic Hour” - that hour before (and just as) the sun comes up, and the hour as dusk falls and the sky turns to night.  During Magic Hour, colors pop with diffuse and spectral light, textures emerge in pictures, portraits assume an added gravitas, and buildings truly reveal their creators’ dreams.

During our 42 day...19 city...14 country trip around the world, we have taken great pains to be onsite and ready to shoot at Magic Hour twice a day as many days as possible.  This often means:

• rising at 4:30 or 5:00 am to get to a site for sunrise shooting,

• careful planning of what to photograph in morning light, and what to photograph in the evening, depending on the orientation of a structure,

• scouting out perfect vantage points the night before,

• and returning as dusk turns to evening for shots from a West-facing perspective.

The light and the feeling of this time is truly magical, like the feeling you get watching the movie Field of Dreams when you are standing in an Iowa cornfield bathed in evening light with the mellifluous tones of James Earl Jones or Burt Lancaster speaking about baseball.

We have experienced that extraordinary feeling of Magic Hour nearly every shooting day of our trip, whether it is shooting the Concert Hall at Tenerife as the sun broke over the horizon, or shooting the eerie stillness of London’s still unfinished Shard as the sunset painted both the distant Shard and the nearby Tower of London in a medieval glow.

But at Bilbao, the feeling lingers.  As the light plays on the structure throughout the day and night, the hour of magic becomes a day, and the day becomes two, and pretty soon you realize that Frank Gehry has frozen time at Bilbao, and that magic can linger at extraordinary times and places.

I tell my daughter that being with her and experiencing Bilbao together is for me the Magic Hour of my life, as part of my life opens like sunrise before me, and other parts close slowly and gently like sunset.  I am fifty now, an age when a man is fully realized, and capable of diving into life at his maximum potential.  But an age also when the shortness of the days to come begin to creep into daily awareness.  An age when the adventures of the future takes their place alongside the adventures of the past, weaving a rich and satisfying tapestry.  An age when striving to achieve becomes somehow bigger than ever, but also an age when magic comes in the little details.  She is sixteen, an age at which the Magic Hour of sunrise is just coming over the horizon.  An age at which she can take her dreams, her skills, her education, her mind, the disciplines and the passions that she has developed, and use them to craft the adult she will become.

Being with my daughter - my firstborn - at Bilbao, as we work and talk together about our dream of building a great wonder of the world for our own hometown, is for me a Magic Hour in my life - part dawn, part dusk, part potential, part celebration.  Thanks Rachel.

I have experienced Magic Hour at Bilbao.  And that is all that matters right now.

- Tod and Rachel