The Guggenheim Bilbao was delivered on time, within just six years, and cost $3 million less than the $100 million budgeted. And it has brought more attention, tourism, and development to Bilbao than the sponsors hoped for, even in their wildest dreams.
opened, in 1997, critics hailed Frank Gehry’s masterpiece as one of the architectural wonders of the past century. The provincial government’s ambitious projections had called for 500,000 people a year to make the trek to Bilbao to visit the museum; in the first three years alone, 4 million came. The term “Bilbao effect” was coined in urban planning and economic development to describe architecture so spectacular it could transform neighborhoods, cities, and regions.
In that light, what Frank Gehry accomplished in Bilbao and elsewhere is astonishing. When you also consider that most of the projects in our database are relatively routine, whereas Gehry’s projects invariably do things that have seldom or never been attempted before, his record looks downright miraculous.
But some of the powerful executives and city officials who had a hand in the project saw Gehry as an unproven minor-league player. Worse, he was an oddball known for using weird and cheap materials in his buildings. “They were scared to death of Frank,” says Richard Koshalek, chairman of the committee that had awarded the project to Gehry. So they sidelined him, asking him to deliver an initial design but not a detailed, buildable plan.
Frank Gehry’s long struggle to create the Walt Disney Concert Hall taught him something fundamental. Control was indispensable. He had to have it, and keep it, from beginning to end. He even coined a term for the setup he needed to be in control—“the organization of the artist”—with the creatives, that is, Gehry and his team, in charge. He has enforced this setup on every project since Disney Hall. It’s a root cause of his success.
That was a lot of weight for any project to carry, and it was hard for Gehry to see how the project envisioned by the officials could deliver what they wanted. Although he liked the building they had selected, it wasn’t well suited to be a space for modern art. And when had a renovation ever had such a transformative effect? But understanding the goal of the project helped Gehry form a different vision that his clients could buy into.
So when real estate developer Bruce Ratner approached Gehry in 2004 to build a 50-story high-rise on a site in lower Manhattan, Gehry asked him why he wanted to do that. What Gehry heard was that the project wasn’t only a business proposition: Ratner wanted to make a prominent addition to the world’s most famous skyline. In that case, Gehry told Ratner, the project needed to be taller.
At last, he hit on the idea of a rectangular tower with a facade made of stainless steel and glass that would bulge and recede in order to create the illusion, at a distance, of cloth rippling in the wind. Many more iterations followed. Finally, they decided they had what they wanted. It was the 74th iteration.
Gehry’s team spent two years thinking through and simulating every detail, in effect building the museum on computers before they built it in reality.
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