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The Bilbao Guggenheim's rollicking form serves as a surreal backdrop, making extraordinary art out of the ordinary life roaming about it. Around every bend, opposite, is some new exhilaration: an unexpected descent, a surprising vista, a soaring vault. (photo: Barbara Flanagan) |
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| Can a building change the way people see their city--and think
about architecture? If the Gehry's Guggenheim is any proof, the answer is a resounding yes! by Barbara Flanagan Now that all the superlatives have been slathered over Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, it's time to ask why the greatest building of our time is great, and what its greatness means to us--people who never believed, or who stopped believing, that a building could make you weep. Certainly the Basques' new museum of contemporary art is not the only place where architecture inspires tears. There are at least two others. Brooding in the Sicilian twilight, Agrigento's Temple of Concord is worth crying over. And when a shaft of sunlight pierces the rooftop oculus of the Pantheon and beams over its perfect dome--now that's amore. The poignancy of these buildings is deepened by a bittersweet regret perpetuated by tourists and architects alike for centuries: The wonder years are long gone. Alas, we'll never build so well again. What is terribly poignant in Bilbao is not futility, but its flip side--a spectacle of newness fraught with unknown potential. So, what's so sad about wonderful? On the eve of opening day, four lithe and tan Canadians from Vancouver leaned against police barricades in front of the new museum, its plaza bristling with cameras, and watched a nervous Gehry, a native of Canada, being patted down with stage makeup before an interview on Spanish television. The Canadians--three college kids and their fortyish mother, a high school principal--had become intrigued by the Bilbao Guggenheim during their two-month camping trip through Europe. Every magazine in every city carried its photographs. They liked the pictures, and while in Barcelona, the foursome decided to make a detour to see it, driving clear across Spain. Now, they wore the same expressions of happy defiance that nationalists wear to their political rallies, a kind of feisty pride. Was it Canadian solidarity on their faces? "I'm mad," said the mother pointing at the silver museum. "This is such an exciting building. I had no idea this was possible. Now I wonder why we haven't had this kind of excitement in all our public buildings, and that makes me angry--that it's been possible all along." Her son and daughters nodded. Talking about her revelation with such articulate conviction, the woman sounded like a plant, the "random" interviewee in a studio audience. But she was not alone. Her children chimed in with the same spontaneous intensity. One compared the museum's metal curves to a woman's body. Another talked about the sound of its hollow skin--she'd knocked on its different parts--and described the suspense of wondering whether the structure could hold its own weight. Here was a little group--one that should have been exhausted by the rigors of chasing down Greek temples and camping across an entire continent--having a religious experience over some American architect's avant-garde masterwork, not even yet open, in a provincial Spanish city. Without Bilbao, they might have gone home to bore their friends with bad photos of the Eiffel tower. But now they had a mission few tourists acquire: to spread hope for the future. Like innocents beamed up to a dazzling mother ship for one of those close encounters with an alien intelligence, the dazed witnesses will describe their experience of an advanced civilization with a snappier way of perceiving the world. If, in a single day, the Guggenheim inspired four upstanding citizens to become lifelong activists for great architecture, then the museum has already transcended its own mission: to bait tourists with modern art. However, it doesn't answer that nagging question: How will the Bilbao Guggenheim revolutionize architecture? Gehry has done something that architects have never been trained to do: he messes with peoples' perceptions by inviting, not pontificating. Rather than bossing them around his complex by flaunting a grand organizational scheme (parti, gestalt, whatever) served by a hierarchy of geometric abstractions graspable by no one but other architects, Gehry offers up his building as an enigmatic lure too mesmerizing to ignore. He appeals not to the history of architecture, but to human nature, with its ever-childlike fascination with menacingly shapeless places that lure one in without promising safe exit: caves, jungles, mine shafts, nightclubs. Ever since they came along, architects have been making up inscrutable, formalistic religions, then recruiting acolytes to follow their rules--"express structural integrity," "ban ornament," "celebrate the nature of materials"--most of which are Latin to the uninitiated. On the public scale, architecture has been about pious intimidation. Ever smug, it tells you when to stand up or sit down, stop or go. And sometimes it just tells you to go away. (The famously barren concrete plaza of Louis I. Kahn's Salk Institute repels intruders.) In Bilbao, Frank Gehry is like an itinerant preacher who arrives out of the blue, raises his big, billowing revival tent on the edge of town, and packs the place with swooning converts with the kind of loose, loud, charismatic evangelism anyone can understand. Somehow the tent enhances the group dynamic, gets everyone chatting, and triggers the kind of emotional revelations rarely found in more staid sects. On opening day, when a tight foursome of old Spanish nuns trotted down the Guggenheim's main staircase--to the sunken entrance--their gait had a mischievous bounce. Were they having serious fun? They surely were causing it. The spectacle of four little nuns descending the staircase in fluttering habits was an aesthetic joy, the kind of inexplicable art moment that's seldom caused by architecture. That moment was about arbitrariness. Walking down any old Spanish sidewalk, the nuns would have looked normal and dignified in their flowing wimples. At the museum, however, they turned exotic, as if the radiant capriciousness of Gehry's building--with its wild and rollicking show of curvy shapes--had illuminated the inherent randomness of everything around it. Just as the building yells out its credo--"Hey, why not! Why shouldn't a building look like this?"--it pesters passersby with the question: "Why?"Indeed, why do nuns dress in titanium gray costumes? Andwhy shouldn't a building dress itself in the same contradictory mode of sacred silliness? As a credo, "Why not?"--or more precisely--"Why the hell not?" is a new direction for world architecture. In Bilbao, that approach feels more profound than purely rebellious. Here, the architect has created a cultural exchange fueled by a dynamic, daily give-and-take between people and building, instead of the usual one-way pontification (say, Meier's Getty) architects usually erect. Gehry supplies Bilbao with the kind of restless, avant-garde landmark that could only come from Los Angeles; and Bilbao provides the kind of patient, formal, dignified public audience that no longer exists in America. Los Angelenos who still regard Frank Gehry as no more than an over-inspired kook in a city chockful of iconoclasts might be surprised to see the architect's work treated with such reverence. The spectacle of the exchange--Spaniards parading around Gehry's obstreperous masterpiece in their brown tweeds and fine leather shoes (no silent Nikes) is a ballet of artistic diplomacy. We teach them how to cut loose architecturally; they teach us how to walk with proper demeanor when touring a civic shrine. And walk we must. Inside and out, the building charms and prods people with endless promises of new surprises. The more visitors move around, the more they complicate, and so enhance, their relationship with the building. For those who've come to know the museum only by the famous image that has become the very picture of progressiveness--a dark Spanish street dead-ending in a glittering mountain--this Guggenheim is not just another two-dimensional architectural pinup. It's a moving target, an unshootable multidimensional foil for everything around it: bridges, cranes, streets, and people. Consequently, the building is not easily explained by plans, sections, elevations--or a critic's florid prose. Last year, on the museum's opening day, October 18, hundreds of impeccably dressed Spanish families walked across town (some rising from Norman Foster's stunning glass and steel subway station), crossed the museum plaza past wreaths of flowers memorializing the guard who'd been shot just days before defending the Guggenheim (against Basque terrorists who believed the building to be a symbol of impending globalization and vowed to blow it up). Undeterred, the families strolled clockwise around the building's periphery, choreographing a slow, circular "paseo," and possibly a new civic tradition. Some citizens headed towards the Nervión River down Gehry's cascade of limestone steps. Promenading along a ribbon of concrete that seemed to float on air between the muddy river and blue reflecting pool, they paused to pose for each other's photographs, then proceeded under the span of a neighboring bridge, past a Gehry staircase masquerading as a tower, around the tail end of the museum, in between bridge pilings, past train tracks, beneath the entrance plaza connecting street and museum, beyond a rail yard with cranes swaying cargo back and forth, and finally, up the down staircase where they'd started. At every turn, scenic backdrops--industrial, urban, and bucolic--arranged themselves in strange and beautiful mismatches of foregrounds and backgrounds, as if stage flats from three different plays had accidentally popped up together. Before the Guggenheim, had the Basques ever really seen their city? Frank Gehry's genius may rest in the way he makes the viewer feel ingeniously observant. He takes people places, without pointing "Look!" He lets them piece together their own experience, and invites them to enjoy the pride of composition. Viewers can feel like collaborators, or, rather, conspirators in their interpretations. And, of course, no reading is right or wrong. (In contrast, other "Art Architects" assume from the start they'll be misunderstood by the masses, and their prophecy is self-fulfilling.) Not that Gehry doesn't taunt his audience. Aware that his viewers have been bodily conditioned to certain logistics--the daily ins and outs of normal architecture--Gehry subverts their expectations. He knows people know that a museum entrance ought to be centered over a grandiose staircase. So naturally he sinks the Guggenheim's front door into an entrance pit resembling an Alpine crevice--with sheets of glass and titanium leaning overhead like so much sliding ice. Nobler front doors, located flush with the plaza, lead only to the gift shop. That's abnormal. But somehow, Gehry manages to stop just short of exasperating his audience. If the museum has a flaw--or, rather, an ironic triumph--it is in the generosity of its flamboyance and the way that excess affects its mission. That generosity makes the art inside look cold, aloof, and a tad irrelevant. The paintings seem arch. The sculpture looks puny. Even the 180-ton curving steel walls of Richard Serra's Snake seem less terrifying than smaller Serras in other places. Like a sculptor, Gehry presents his building in a series of magical aesthetic moments that don't require the prior knowledge or concentration that so much of contemporary art demands. Walk 20 feet, look up, and "yuck," there's a carp-textured wall puckering at you in some rudely organic way. Go another few yards, and "sigh," a vision of solemnity appears beyond: a tower, lean and graceful. Proceed some more, and "yikes," that statuesque tower starts leaning at a Pisian angle, and now twisting, racking, peeling, appears about to fall over. (In comparison, broken plates and neon tubes look tame.) On opening day, a Spanish grandmother, in tired working-class dress, looked exhausted by the Guggenheim as she rested on an atrium bench. "How do you like the museum?" an American asked. Grimacing, she said she'd hoped for guides to explain all the strange art. "How about the architecture?" Looking up at the skylight, the woman, straightened, and then smiled grandly: "Ah, fabulosa!" Gehry's architectural experiment frees building from the old rules and frees audiences from their old habits. For better or worse, it beats looking at art. And that moxie is going to change architecture forever. Barbara Flanagan writes from her home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. |
Keywords:
Spain, Guggenheim, Gehry, museum