Is the Guggenheim Museum just another piece of Avante Garde in Bilbao?
It was inevitably going to be a hard act to follow for Frank Gehry who was charged with giving the Guggenheim Foundation a suitably spectacular home in the Basque capital of Bilbao. In the 1980s Bilbao was in danger of sinking into obscurity with the decline of the heavy industry upon which it once relied for its wealth and power. It was a grimy, uninviting city – reminiscent of Dickens’ darkest descriptions of Victorian England – and certainly not a place which attracted the interest of foreign visitors. All credit then to the forward thinking city fathers and Basque regional government who decided to give Bilbao a major spring clean and a new lease of life to springboard it into the 21st century as a modern, dynamic centre of culture and commerce. And the face of this “new Bilbao” was to be one of the most imaginative architectural feats ever undertaken in Europe – an art museum funded by the Basque government and run by the Guggenheim Foundation which agreed to supply priceless work
