It is hard to think of anyone more significant in international architectural practice than Frank Gehry who died yesterday.

In his memory, I have looked up what I wrote about the early gestation of the Guggenheim, Bilbao for my book, The Art Museum in Modern Times. Here it is (at least, this is the version I wrote before it was edited):-

The Guggenheim Bilbao emerged from a set of loose sketches by Gehry done back in his hotel bedroom after visiting the site on 7 July 1991, which were then worked up into a model so that he could ‘carve it in my head’ and then developed further through multiple sketches, based on his memory of the form of his previous projects and on the ways in which a building might replicate the movement of a fish or a boat sailing in the wind.[1]   Gehry’s fluent conceptual drawings were then interpreted by his office on their new CATIA (Computer Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application) programme, which had been developed for the design of aeroplane wings.   The final result, which evolved and was refined during 1992 and 1993, was the product of three people who worked well together and shared intellectual and creative ambitions.

          The first was Gehry himself.   He had had a long apprenticeship, experimenting with ideas, falling out with clients, using new materials, regarding himself as much as a sculptor as an architect, shaping forms and using materials much more casually and arbitrarily than would be normal for an architect, treating architecture as a product of free invention, much influenced by his friendships with artists not just in the local Los Angeles community, but including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in New York as well.   By the time he came to design the Guggenheim Bilbao, he was in his early sixties;  he had won the Pritzker Prize in 1989, which had given him the confidence to be viewed as a member of the international architectural establishment;  in November 1989, he had been appointed as architect for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles;  and, as a result of winning the Disney Hall commission, he had had to enlarge and professionalise his office, appointing two partners, Jim Glymph and Randy Jefferson.   The Guggenheim Bilbao was, by the standards of the Concert Hall, a much simpler project;  and he was able to use all the experience of the difficulties of the Concert Hall to produce a very pure, free-standing, relatively economical project for Bilbao, a distillation of his belief in the value of free-form design.  

          The second key figure was Krens, who was, like Gehry, a left-field figure, trained not as an art historian, like most directors of art museums, but as an artist.   He was in his early forties, very ambitious, and more than happy to do things differently from his peers.   After Gehry had won the commission, Krens wrote a long letter outlining in detail the various concerns of the committee and from that point onwards, he flew to Los Angeles twice a month to work with Gehry on the details of the design.   It was Krens who insisted that there were six relatively conventional, rectilinear gallery spaces which Gehry’s team called the ‘stodgy’ galleries, but which allowed the building to be used for the display of art.[2]

          The third key figure was Ignacio Vidarte, the head of the authority which was created to be responsible for the building’s delivery and who shared a belief in its symbolic significance — for the city, as a symbol of its revival after a long period of industrial decline (the building of the museum coincided with a number of other major capital projects) and as a way to attract foreign visitors, and for Basque culture more widely, giving confidence to the region.   He became the first Director of the Museum and was later appointed as Krens’s Deputy Director of Global Strategies.  

          The Guggenheim Museum represented a paradigm shift in the way that people think about museums.   It has been successful not so much for its contents — no-one thinks of it in terms of its collection, although it has been very successful in its temporary exhibitions — but, instead, as a great and grandiose civic monument, attracting visitors by its adventurous architectural form, shimmering under its titanium skin.   Some parts of the inside are visually exciting as well, including the grand entrance atrium and a huge gallery containing a Richard Serra sculpture.   But what is most exciting is the view of the building from outside as a feature in the surrounding city.

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[1] The design process is described in detail in Coosje Van Bruggen, Frank O Gehry: Guggenheim Museum (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997), pp.31-94.

[2] Van Bruggen, p.112.