Overview

There is no doubt at all that Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is one of the most spectacular buildings of recent years. As the central element in Bilbao's comprehensive urban renewal programme the building raised high expectations from the outset. Its site between river, railway, bridge and new town makes it a symbol of the Basque metropolis that can be seen from a considerable distance. It is both the heart of the city and a test bed for the arts, representing both public presence and artistic change. The process by which it was created demonstrates the most recent advances in computer aided design and in material manufacture. For a long time design and building were broken down into a large number of individual components, Gehry's museum unifies this process and is thus able to create fluent links between architectural detail and urban impact. But the innovations do not stop at technology, they also extend to the way in which the interior spaces are shaped. These are extremely varied in form, as the museum is not so much designed to house a permanent exhibition of the collection, but to enable artists to create installations.In contrast with the usual neutral gallery spaces, Gehry offers a whole variety of stages for artistic presentation. His artist friends have risen to the challenge of his architecture and are experimenting very successfully with this new way of showing their work to the public.

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Kurt W. Forster studied art history, literature and archaeology at the universities in Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Florence and London. He taught at Yale University (1960-67), Stanford University (1967-82) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1982-84), and then became the first director of the newly established Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica (1984-92), where he inaugurated a broadly based programme of research and publications. After that he taught again, now at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich (1992-99). Before achieving his present position as director of the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio he was director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (1999-2001). Ralph Richter studied at the Fachhochschule Dortmund. He rapidly made a name for himself as an architectural photographer. He also took the photographs for Opus 21: Norman Foster, Commerzbank, Frankfurt am Main.

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