Location: Bilbao, Spain
Date: 1997
Features from the Web about this building:
Frank Gehry: “I was looking for a way to express feeling in three-dimensional objects. I never expected Bilbao to be the, kinda, hit it turned out to be. In fact, when it opened I was very self-conscious about it, and thought, ‘My God, what have I done?”
Mildred Friedman, Writer, Curator: “He just let go. He began to develop all of the ideas that he’d been beginning to work with and went the whole way there. I don’t think there’s a building that comes anywhere near it in inventiveness in this period of our history… ”
Philip Johnson, Architect: “I swear I don’t know why, it moved me just as much at the end of two days as it did when I first walked in…”
Norman Rosenthal, Curator: “The most impressive cathedral at the end of the 20th century is to me, without question, the museum in Bilbao. You see it and you gasp with astonishment! It’s like a vision of a kind of paradise.”
Nerea Abasolo, Journalist, Bilbao: “We have 350,000 inhabitants in the downtown. The first year we received 700,000 visitors. And then a kind of community self-esteem has increased so much. We have moved from admiring the architect to be proud of being the clever ones who did this project and have chosen this architect, and we have this building which the whole world admires.”
Julian Schnabel, Filmaker and Artist: “It makes me feel encouraged, it makes me feel like… there’s somebody that’s setting up an arena where something incredible could occur. He threw down the glove – let’s put something in here that can really take somebody into that transcendental state that you feel when you’re making art.”
