Guillaume

For my project I did architecture. I did this because not many people will look at a building and see art; they see a building. But in some cases the building is just as important. One example of this, and the building that I will be doing my report on, is the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The main art elements used in this work are line, form and texture. Texture wise the building has a rough finish that Frank Gehry tried to get to make it more attractive. The curves in the building are designed to look random and to catch the light, because he likes to make his buildings look random, when in fact they were very hard to design. If you look at the museum from above it looks like a giant metallic flower. The rooms and galleries are oriented on the inside, as the building is on the outside, meaning, if there is a curve in the outside wall, the room or gallery at that part of the museum would have that curve. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain was designed by Frank O. Gehry, covers 24,000m2 and is 57metres high. It has twenty galleries in total and was officially opened on Sunday, October 19 1997. The museum was constructed on time and on budget, which is extremely rare for this type of building. The museum has, like many of Gehry’s works, a fish-like theme. Bilbao was originally a fishing town, and then it became a steel producing town, so Gehry thought he would use the town’s history as a base. The Ministers of Culture and Finance, the president and the Mayor asked him for something big, a magnificent building that would reflect the third age of Bilbao. He had been planning something like the museum for a while and during the time that he was working his office looked like a ‘tailor’s shop,’ with every piece laid out in flat patterns and his wall was filled with ideas that had been tried and rejected, until he had what he wanted and everything fit together perfectly. The panels of titanium lining parts of the building like fish scales are each half a millimetre thick. In the museum, the parts that are not dedicated to showing art are the auditorium that covers 1100 m2, a restaurant and cafeteria cover 1100m2, a library covering 200m2, a store and 2 cafes which can each be accessed either from the museum or the square outside. The glass used in the museum is specially treated to let maximum light in while heat and UV radiation stay out. The main materials in the building are titanium, glass, limestone and a steel frame. Especially large artworks can be put in a special room 30 meters wide by 130 meters long, the room has no columns and a special hard floor to hold the weight of any art put in it. The designing of the “fluid” shapes was helped with a computer program that was used in the aerospace industry. It is built on the edge of the Nervion River and is supposedly built to look like a boat. The museum is featured in the opening sequence of a James Bond movie titled //The World is Not Enough//. The museum only has one permanent exhibit; //The Matter of Time// by Richard Serra. This is a number of steel sculptures that stay in a 130 m gallery originally known as the Fish Gallery, but is now called Arcelor Gallery, after the steel company that sponsored it. The atrium is 300m2 and 50 metres high. Before titanium 29 different materials were considered, some of these were, copper, stainless steel and aluminium. Gehry tried steel before he found titanium; there were about fifty types of steel to choose from, he tried almost everything; but in the wrong light it went dead. Then he found a piece of titanium in his materials file and nailed it to the telephone pole outside his office, to see how it would do. Later that day it rained and the titanium turned golden. So he looked up the price for titanium, which was twice that of steel and wouldn’t fit the budget. Then he had a moment of genius, which was; since titanium was stronger than steel he could make it thinner, so he halved the thickness and at the time Russia was dumping titanium on the market, which further decreased the price. Once they had the titanium they spent two years at a Pittsburgh steel mill to make titanium thin sheets. They used acid and oil to get the right colours on the titanium and then they put it through the rollers, to get it just the way they wanted it. It is truly a one of a kind building. Building this kind of building is impossible because the cost of titanium and all the materials it would just cost way too much to be feasible. Instead of titanium, the administrative offices are made out of marble. There are 19 galleries, 10 of these are of an almost classical design and can be found by the limestone exterior the other nine are irregularly shaped and are found with the titanium exterior. The museum received the Outstanding Structure Award in 2001. Outside the museum there are two sculptures, Mama a ten metre tall spider and Puppy, a twelve metre tall sitting dog made out of flowers. Frank Gehry has designed a number of famous buildings including the Walt Disney Theatre, Experience Music Project, The Dancing House and Marques de Riscal Vineyard Hotel.

Guggenheim bibliography [] [|http://www.guggenheim.org/bilbao] [] [] [] You tube: search Frank Gehry Guggenheim Bilbao interview first one interview starts 4min [] [] [] []