Learning from the Bilbao GuggenheimAna María Guasch, Joseba Zulaika "The word is out that miracles still occur, and that a major one is happening here ... 'Have you seen Bilbao?' In architectural circles, the question has acquired the status of a shibboleth. Have you seen the light? Have you seen the future?" Herbert Muschamp's future is now. What can we learn from "The Guggenheim Effect"?" "Hailed as an "instant landmark," Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim brought a new sense of relevance to architecture in the transformation of urban landscapes. It was the story of the architect as hero and, as Greeks believed, of architecture as the first art-arche. Bilbao was doing for the Basques what the Sydney Opera House had done for Australia. Gehry, while complaining of being "geniused to death," became not only the master architect but the master artist. As a result, after Bilbao, every city has dreamed of its own Guggenheim effect. Gehry's optimistic artichoke amid Bilbao's post-industrial ruin has become an icon of what architecture can do for a city in decline. Warhol seems to be right in his prognostication that every museum should become a supermarket. Yet Hal Foster wondered, "Why all the hoopla?" Wasn't Gehry's museum risking the most problematic aspects of modernist monumentality and post-modernist faux populism?" "In this volume, artists (Fraser, Haacke, Muntadas, Sekula), architecture critics (Colomina, Gilbert-Rolfe), urban planners (Azua), art historians (Guilbaut, Guasch, Moxey, Welchman), museum specialists (Camara, Viar), art and tourism writers (Lippard, MacCannell), and anthropologists (Zulaika) discuss the various aspects of the Bilbao Guggenheim from an interdisciplinary perspective." -- Book Jacket. |
