Here’s a milestone for you: the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao celebrated its 20th anniversary this fall. Besides launching a major transformation of a sleepy Spanish industrial city, the museum’s opening unleashed a global arts race to elevate urban fortunes with radical cultural architecture—a phenomenon still very much with us today. Before Bilbao, there were innovative modern museums, of course—the first Guggenheim (1959), by the first Frank, and Marcel Breuer’s Whitney (1966) are just two examples—but Frank Gehry’s building was far more influential for the field of architecture at large, prompting a flood of high-profile competitions and game-changing commissions for the many contemporary designers who were scrambling to mount the world stage.
Some of these architectural forays glorified the urban past, converting moribund industrial buildings into arts facilities for the digital age—like the Tate Modern by Herzog & de Meuron (2000)—while others, such as the MAXXI museum in Rome by Zaha Hadid (2009), left history in the dust, though responded to some aspects of the local surroundings.
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