GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

It extends under an ordinary car bridge. The Museum. Gehry’s Guggenheim. It extends under a four lane, mediocre vehicle bridge that spans the river.  The bridge runs over the museum.

We were just in Bilbao, which is a fantastic city. And of course we made the pilgrimage to Guggenheim Bilbao. At first all we could do was walk around it in amazement and wonder. And I was stunned to realize that the ground floor gallery extends under the full width of a rather 60’s era vehicular bridge. And that at the very end of the museum is a very tall tail like tower shape clad in stone.  And this tail is very much part of the composition.

After I got over a wave of architectural insecurity, (as in was I supposed to know this / how could I not have known this?), I did a Goggle Image search of the museum. And sure enough, while a couple of the images had the auto bridge, most of them did not. Most of the Goggle Images had the auto bridge edited out. Meaning you were left with the iconic twists and folds of the heart of the museum.

Never mind that the museum is fantastic, which it is. What I object to is this cultural editing of the bridge. This unfortunate cultural / photographic editing is a theme here at Transparent Drawing.  Link to a previous post on this theme here.

I guess that most photographers wanted to tell the story of the iconoclastic masterpiece, and a stupid river bridge compromises that story.  I guess the bridge is an impure and foreign element in the masterful sculptural composition of the museum.

But this cannot be edited out! There is a sweeping stone stairway that takes you up under the bridge, and connects to the bridge. There is a small gallery at the end with a window and when you look out this window, you see the underside of the bridge. Some of the greatest views of the museum are from the bridge. In fact, the bridge provides a significant part of the context.  The Museum is tied into the city via the bridge.  It serves as a pedestrian link to the City, and Gehry made this link brilliantly.

Like I said, if I was supposed to know that the museum runs under the bridge, I did not.  But now that I understand this, the building is even more fantastic.