The overlooked corners inside

• La Salve Bridge

  Looking up from the river, the museum's eastern 'Fish Gallery' stretches out until it nearly grazes a red cable-stayed bridge spanning the Nervion -- the La Salve Bridge. The bridge already stood here when construction began, forcing Gehry to design around it; his response was to erect a tower at the bridgehead and effectively absorb the structure into the museum's silhouette. The bridge's name comes from a seafaring tradition: ships sailing up the Nervion into the port of Bilbao would spot the statue of Our Lady of Begona at this precise point, and sailors would begin singing the Salve Regina (la Salve) in her honour.

  Sources: es.wikipedia.org

• Origins and Key Decisions

  The museum owes its existence to an American director's plans for European expansion -- but the path to completion took an unexpected turn. Thomas Krens, who led the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation from 1988 to 2008, pursued a strategy of circulating the foundation's collection internationally and identified Berlin and Bilbao as two European outposts. The initial idea was not a new building but a conversion: an old city-centre warehouse in Bilbao called the Alhondiga (Market Exchange). Krens approached Frank Gehry, drawn by his experience converting spaces for contemporary art exhibitions. Gehry won a ten-day design competition in 1991 -- driven largely by legal procedure -- but then persuaded Krens to abandon the warehouse entirely. Instead, he proposed building from scratch on a riverside site to the north of the city, visible simultaneously from three of its high points.

  Sources: es.wikipedia.org

• The Design Process

  Gehry took on this commission at the moment his design for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles had just been shelved; that unfinished concept fed directly into Bilbao -- the two buildings share a strikingly similar compositional approach. To arrive at the final form, Gehry built dozens of physical models by hand, testing one after another. A selection of these handmade models went on public display from July 1995 in a palazzo in Venice, as part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection exhibition. Gehry himself does not use computers, but his design team digitised the models using CATIA software developed by Dassault Systemes, making it possible to translate the complex geometry into precise construction documents. Adapting CATIA into an architectural design tool was expensive; the Guggenheim Foundation covered the cost.

  Sources: es.wikipedia.org

• Exterior Form

  Standing outside the museum, you encounter two almost contradictory worlds at once. To the east, the Gran Sala -- nicknamed the 'Fish Gallery' -- unspools in layers of twisting curved panels, stretching toward the La Salve Bridge; from this angle the building feels weightless, almost floating. Turn to the south, facing the city, and the building shifts entirely: a row of rectilinear volumes with flat facades, no titanium cladding, regular rectangular windows, and walls finished in lilac or cream-coloured stone. Gehry calls this deliberate juxtaposition contrapunto -- a term borrowed from music, meaning the placing of sharply contrasting elements side by side.

  Sources: es.wikipedia.org

• Titanium Cladding

  The shimmering metal skin was inspired by animal scales and feathers. Gehry was fascinated by the way nature covers curved surfaces, and decided on a system of layered, interlocking hard 'scales' -- rigid panels overlapping and locking together. The choice of material went through several rounds: stainless steel was rejected because Gehry felt it clashed with Bilbao's sky; copper and other metals were also ruled out. Titanium won, despite its cost -- a sharp contrast to the cheap, everyday materials he had favoured early in his career. The alloy used is primarily titanium with added zinc, and each panel is only one-third of a millimetre thick -- thin enough to conform fully to the building's compound curves.

  Sources: es.wikipedia.org

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