Living with art

Not by accident, certainly by design, this city’s belief in the allure of beauty has made it famous

August 07, 2011|By Patricia Harris and David Lyon, Globe Correspondents

The roof of the AlhndigaBilbao, the building remade by Philippe Starck,… (DAVID LYON FOR THE BOSTON…)

BILBAO, Spain - Local teens are probably oblivious that an international panel of critics surveyed by Vanity Fair last year anointed the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao the most important piece of architecture since 1980. The kids are too busy hurtling their skateboards down the stairs and ramps of the outside terraces or bombing soccer balls against the impossible curves of the museum’s famous titanium skin. Runners in Spandex stride the riverfront path, dwarfed below the museum’s looming mass. At a nearby plaza, adults sip wine and tap their feet to a jazz combo. The people of Bilbao live the “Guggenheim effect’’ every day.

Economic revival through landmark architecture has become an international article of faith since the Guggenheim Bilbao opened in October 1997. But the museum did more than alter Bilbao’s skyline and bring in tourists - it changed the city’s soul.

Bilbainos never tire of relating how grim their once-proud industrial city had become. By the 1980s, the shipbuilding and steel industries had collapsed, leaving double-digit unemployment, decaying dockyards, and a polluted environment. “It was a gray, awful city,’’ says Gaetan De Backer, who guides some of the more than 900,000 foreigners who visit the Guggenheim each year. “We needed to make a big transformation.’’

Bilbao and the Basque regional government launched several ambitious infrastructure projects to improve transportation and clean up abandoned industrial sites, but they placed their biggest bet on culture. To put Bilbao on the world map, they spent more than $100 million to partner with New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which was shopping for overseas satellite locations.

Although Bilbao has an elegant Victorian sector, architect Frank Gehry chose to build on the blighted banks of the Río Nervión, where his architecturally complex building rose in just four years. Its fish-shaped forms were a radical departure, even for Gehry. Seeing the finished building just before it opened, he admitted to Vanity Fair writer Matt Tyrnauer that his first reaction was “Oh, my God, what have I done to these people?’’ It took a few years before the building began to grow on him.

“It’s a strange building for Bilbao, but it works,’’ says De Backer. Lest visitors miss Gehry’s intentional references to the massive Romanesque churches found all across northern Spain, De Backer gestures to the soaring ceilings and the museum’s skylit central atrium that floods the interior with daylight. “It’s like a cathedral,’’ he says - a cathedral that showcases contemporary and modern art from 1945 to the present.