Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The museum has three aims in its mission. The museum wants to bring together and help the public to interpret the arts of our time. They want to encourage art education. They also want to increase the knowledge of the public's understanding of the arts.[3] The collections at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao have works by the some of the most famous artists of the past four decades. There are works of many genres including Minimalism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Abstract Expressionism. Spanish contemporary and Basque art are also displayed from some of the local and regional artists.

There are over one hundred exhibitions in the museum. There have been approximately ten million visitors to the museum.

In the fall of 1993, architects at Gehry Partners began to utilize Dassault Systemes' CATIA software for the schematic design phase of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to digitize and model the exterior of the Museum project. Essentially, this software calculates point by point the stresses to which materials are subjected, by generating a 3D model showing the different tensions and allowing the values of many structural elements of the museum to be calculated: the steel structure, titanium cladding or foundations, among others. It also helped to automate the cutting of materials such as stone or titanium plates.

The architects applied Master Modeling and Virtual Build Processes they learned from Rick Smith[22][23] and his use of the same techniques on the Walt Disney Concert Hall during the previous two years.[24] The success and global awareness of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao ushered in a new era of Virtual Building and was a catalyst for what would become popularly known as Building Information Modeling seven years later.

Pulitzer prize winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger shares the words of others that Bilbao "could not have been constructed without CATIA". He further relays that Bilbao "was the first building for which CATIA played a role in almost every aspect of the design and construction process".[25]

The museum notably houses "large-scale, site-specific works and installations by contemporary artists", such as Richard Serra's 100-meter-long (340 ft) Snake, and displays the work of Basque artists, "as well as housing a selection of works" from the Foundation's modern art collection.[11] In 1997, the museum opened with "The Guggenheim Museums and the Art of This Century", a 300-piece overview of 20th-century art from Cubism to new media art. Most pieces came from the Guggenheim's permanent collection, but the museum also acquired paintings by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still and commissioned new works by Francesco Clemente, Anselm Kiefer, Jenny Holzer and Richard Serra.[6]

The exhibitions change often; the museum generally hosts thematic exhibitions, centered for example on Chinese or Russian art.[citation needed] Traditional paintings and sculptures are a minority compared to installations and electronic forms. The highlight of the collection, and its only permanent exhibit, is The Matter of Time (incorporating an earlier work, Snake), a series of weathering steel sculptures designed by Serra, which is housed in the 130-meter Arcelor Gallery (formerly known as the Fish Gallery but renamed in 2005 for the steel manufacturer that sponsored the project).[26] The collections usually highlight Avant-garde art, 20th century abstraction, and non-objective art. When the museum announced the 2011 exhibition "The Luminous Interval", a show of artwork belonging to Greek businessman Dimitris Daskalopoulos, who is also a museum trustee, this met with criticism of, among other things, too much curatorial power for a serious benefactor.[27] In 2005, Olivier Berggruen and Ingrid Pfeiffer curated a retrospective of Yves Klein.[28] In 2012 David Hockney's exhibition drew over 290,000 visitors to the museum.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation selected Frank Gehry as the architect, and its director, Thomas Krens, encouraged him to design something daring and innovative. The curves on the exterior of the building were intended to appear random; the architect said that "the randomness of the curves are designed to catch the light". The interior "is designed around a large, light-filled atrium with views of Bilbao's estuary and the surrounding hills of the Basque country." The atrium, which Gehry nicknamed The Flower because of its shape, serves as the organizing center of the museum.

When the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened to the public in 1997, it was immediately hailed as one of the world's most spectacular buildings in the style of Deconstructivism (although Gehry does not associate himself with that architectural movement), a masterpiece of the 20th century. Architect Philip Johnson described it as "the greatest building of our time", while critic Calvin Tomkins, in The New Yorker, characterized it as "a fantastic dream ship of undulating form in a cloak of titanium," its brilliantly reflective panels also reminiscent of fish scales. Herbert Muschamp praised its "mercurial brilliance" in The New York Times Magazine. The Independent calls the museum "an astonishing architectural feat". The building inspired other structures of similar design across the globe, such as the Cerritos Millennium Library in Cerritos, California.

The museum is seamlessly integrated into the urban context, unfolding its interconnecting shapes of stone, glass and titanium on a 32,500-square-meter site along the Nervión River in the old industrial heart of the city; while modest from street level, it is most impressive when viewed from the river. With a total 256,000 square feet, it had more exhibition space than the three Guggenheim collections in New York and Venice combined at that time. Eleven thousand square meters of exhibition space are distributed over nineteen galleries, ten of which follow a classic orthogonal plan that can be identified from the exterior by their stone finishes. The remaining nine galleries are irregularly shaped and can be identified from the outside by their swirling organic forms and titanium cladding. The largest gallery, measures 30 meters wide and 130 meters long. In 2005, it housed Richard Serra's monumental installation "The Matter of Time", which Robert Hughes dubbed "courageous and sublime".

The building was constructed on time and budget, which is rare for architecture of this type. In an interview in Harvard Design Magazine, Gehry explained how he did it. First, he ensured that what he calls the "organization of the artist" prevailed during construction, to prevent political and business interests from interfering with the design. Second, he made sure he had a detailed and realistic cost estimate before proceeding. Third, he used computer visualizations and collaborated closely with the individual building trades to control costs during construction.

After the 1997 opening of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Basque Country (Wikipedia Article), Spain, it has changed the way people think about art and museums because of the connections between collecting, architecture, and art in general. Interestingly enough, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was said to be the most important structure of this time when it originally opened.

This special museum was inaugurated in October, 1997 by King Juan Carlos the First of Spain and built along the Nervion River, which runs through Bilbao out to the Cantabrian Sea (Wikipedia Article). It's one of the many museums that belong to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, as well.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is special because it has been hailed as a representation of a rare moment where academics, the general public, and even the critics all united over something, and that is a significant moment for the architectural culture. It has been named one of the more important works completed after 1980, and in 2010, among architectural experts for the World Architecture Survey.

The collection here dates from the present day all the way back to the mid-twentieth century, and concentrates on post-war sculptures and paintings from both Europe and America. This type of collection yields some great wonders from two very different worlds, and even includes key works from artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Robert Motherwell; Willem de Kooning, Richard Serra; and Gilbert & George.

"Flower dog"
The facade of the museum is guarded by a 13-meter flower dog (Perro de la flor) named Puppy. The sculptor and artist Jeff Koons took as a basis the image of a Scottish West Highland White Terrier puppy. The "coat" of a dog consists of 70,000 flowers. Here and velvet, and marigold, and petunias, and magnolias, etc. As soon as the flowers fade, they are immediately replaced with new ones.

The sculpture was originally intended for an exhibition in Germany in 1992, after which it was planned to disassemble the exhibit into flower beds. But plans changed, and the dog stayed in Germany until 1995. Then the sculpture was dismantled and transported to Australia, to the area of ​​the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney Harbor, where it stood for two years. For the opening of the Guggenheim Museum, the installation was brought to Bilbao, where it remains to this day.