Frank Gehry, the second most famous modern architect in North America after Frank Lloyd Wright, recently passed away at the age of 96.
In 2000, the well known architect critic Jonathan Glancey wrote a terrific piece about Gehry, the “The Man Who Sculpts Buildings,” reflecting on his architecture, his backstory, and his philosophy.
Though he’d been well known in architect circles for decades, he didn’t become a global “starchitect” until the late 90s, well into his 60s, when his Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao. By far his most famous and influential building.
We can talk about his groundbreaking use of 3D software or how he bent geometry to his will, but what’s more interesting to us isn’t his creations but what his creations created.
In the early 1990s, Bilbao wasn’t sexy. Unlike cities like Barcelona or Madrid, it was just a rust-belt industrial port that had seen better days. Like Pittsburgh, only smaller.
The city’s leaders knew that tweaking around the edges wouldn’t bring it back. Something radical was needed. So they concocted a bold scheme of urban regeneration with a world-class museum at its heart. Something that would put a city most people had hardly heard of onto the world map, attracting tourists, investment, and perhaps most importantly, talent.
Guggenheim Bilbao wasn’t the pond. It was the stone that created the ripples.
And it worked. Bilbao is now a major tourist destination and the museum alone brings in hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the local economy. But the ripples didn’t just stop at Bilbao. In 2007, economist Beatriz Plaza coined “The Bilbao Effect” to describe how this idea spread to other cities seeking the same transformation.
Said differently, now everybody wants a Guggenheim. Abu Dhabi is building both a new Guggenheim and a Louvre Museum, plus the Zayed National Museum by Sir Norman Foster, and a performing arts center by Zaha Haid. Dundee, a small, working class Scottish city that’s been in decline since the 1960s, recently opened the V&A Dundee, with a radical design created by the Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma. In Brazil there’s Cidade das Artes in Rio de Janeiro designed by Santiago Calatrava, and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, designed by Moshe Safdie.
Unlucky for them, those copycat projects have met with limited success. Likely because urban regeneration is a highly complex phenomenon that, like urban degeneration, can take decades. “Starchitect” buildings, though glorious, are not a panacea.
There’s something else at play too. What Bilbao did was an experiment. What came after was just a recipe.
In retrospect, Gehry’s swooping titanium forms may look formulaic now. But that’s only because we see them with eyes he opened for us.
Look at his body of work: from corrugated metal and chain-link fences in his Santa Monica home, to crumpled paper bags in Sydney, to fish forms in Minneapolis, to jewel-like glass in Paris. Every building was distinctly his, but different. He never repeated a formula. Not even his own.
His final major building, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, nearing completion as he died, looks nothing like the one in Bilbao. Same client. Same brief. Completely different experiment.
What made Gehry great wasn’t a magic Gehry formula. It was a willingness to keep experimenting until the end.
Peter Thiel said: “competition is for losers.” His point is if you’re doing what everyone else is doing, you’ve already lost.
The cities that followed Bilbao saw the outcome and tried to purchase it, but you can’t buy an experiment. You can only run one.
The lesson isn’t “build a spectacular building.” The lesson is: be willing to do something so audacious that no one’s sure it will work. Including you.
