Bilbao - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 92

In the case of the museum, the Basque and Guggenheim leaders invited three architects to par-
ticipate in a 1991 design competition: Arata Isozaki & Associates of Japan, Coop Himmelblau of
Austria, and Frank O. Gehry & Associates of Santa Monica, California. Both Himmelblau and
Gehry argued that the museum should be located not downtown but on a riverfront site, and it was
Gehry's design for an unconventional structure in an abandoned industrial area at a bend in the Ner-
vion River that won the competition. The site, formerly occupied by a factory and a parking lot, was
also intersected by the Puente de la Salve, a cable-stayed bridge that carries a main traffic artery
into Bilbao. Rather than seeing the bridge as an obstacle, Gehry saw it as something to work with,
and he designed one of the museum's galleries—a 450-foot-long-by-80-foot-wide columnless space
suitable for accommodating the truly large-scale multimedia works that are so favored by contem-
porary artists—to pass under the bridge and effectively incorporate it into the museum's design.
(Another gallery, designed especially to house Guernica, Picasso's large painting commemorating
the bombing by the Nazis of the nearby town of that name, has yet to see the function of its space
realized. Bilbao's request to Madrid that the painting be loaned was turned down because Guernica
was said to be too fragile to travel. Basque observers saw the decision as motivated by politics.)
Gehry's international reputation is that of an architect who uses distinctive forms and new mater-
ials. He has designed private residences as well as concert halls, and for his body of work he had
been awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1989. His own home started out as “a small pink two-story house
in a middle-class neighborhood,” which he redesigned and expanded by building a new structure
around three sides of it, thus preserving much of the original and its cultural evocations. The ma-
terials Gehry used on his house included corrugated metal, plywood, and chain-link fencing, and
it was not everyone's idea of improving the neighborhood. But Gehry's unconventional genius has
also been manifested in his design for the Walt Disney Concert Hall for Los Angeles and, of course,
the Bilbao museum, which the Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn, who received the 1997 Pritzker
Prize, described as “an instant sketch that has been realized.”
How an architect's sketch, instant or otherwise, is realized is often no easy task. In the case of
Bilbao, as with many of Gehry's designs, the walls were typically neither vertical nor flat, and so
devising a structural frame to hold up the sculptural building was no ordinary feat of engineering.
However, the situation is not unique to the late twentieth century or to Gehry's buildings. When the
sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty to be a gift from France to the
United States on the occasion of its centennial, he did not himself deal with how to hold steady in
the wind of New York Harbor the beaten copper sheets that would be shipped across the ocean to
make up the 151-foot-tall statue. That job eventually fell to the bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel, who
devised a structural frame of wrought iron to which the copper shell of the statue could be attached
and by which it would be supported. A mistake made during the erection of the ironwork led in
time to a weakened arm on the statue, a condition that prevented tourists from continuing to climb
into its torch. In addition, when the statue was closed for maintenance and repair in preparation for
America's bicentennial, much work had to be done on the connection points between the copper
skin and the iron frame, where an electrochemical reaction between the dissimilar metals had led to
considerable corrosion.
Another instant sketch of a sculptural structure that was realized only after considerable time and
money were spent is the Sydney Opera House. When the city of Sydney, Australia, decided that it