Of Frank Gehry’s outlandish design for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, its director, Juan Ignacio Vidarte, simply says: “We are very proud and lucky to have a building that is a masterpiece.” Initiated in 1991 by the Basque government in partnership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, the museum is the flagship that anchored a wider strategy: to regenerate an ailing post-industrial city through international architecture. Since the 24,000 sq. m, titanium-tiled building opened on 19 October 1997, it has welcomed more than 20 million visitors—two-thirds of them from outside Spain—and spawned myriad cultural projects worldwide aimed at replicating the “Bilbao effect”.
For its 20th anniversary weekend, the Guggenheim Bilbao has turned its reflective surface into a giant projection screen for a light show. Named Reflections, it is the latest major commission by 59 Productions, the London-based design company behind similar video-mapping animations on the façades of the Sydney Opera House and Edinburgh Castle, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum’s record-breaking David Bowie Is touring exhibition. The free public event is sponsored by the city of Bilbao, the provincial council of Biscay and the Spanish energy company Iberdrola, whose headquarters are located next to the museum.
Thousands of spectators gathered on the riverbank opposite the museum to watch the dramatically scored 20-minute projection on its opening night (11 October). Conceived as a visual journey through the site’s history, from its steel-making past to its transformation through art, the show drew gasps, laughter and applause from the crowds. An early sequence played with the curvy structure’s resemblance to a ship, sketching in the port holes and upper deck of a grand ocean liner cruising the waves, while another re-enacted the laying of its 33,000 titanium panels. Leo Warner, the founding director of 59 Productions, describes the event as a “unique piece of theatre in which the building itself is the hero”.
At other moments, however, Gehry’s creation took on the character of some of the most distinctive works in the Guggenheim Bilbao collection. The silhouette of Louise Bourgeois’s monumental spider sculpture Maman (1999) spun a white web across the darkened backdrop, before grass and pansies bloomed to evoke the museum’s topiary guard dog, Jeff Koons’s 12-metre-high Puppy (1992). With performances on a loop over four evenings between 8.30pm and 11pm, the show continues tonight and tomorrow (until 14 October).
Though it will disturb the peace for a few days, the “exceptional” event was planned with local residents in mind, says Vidarte. More than 200,000 people are expected to attend over the four nights. “We have been [celebrating] throughout this calendar year but around these dates in October, which are closer to our anniversary, we are making a special effort to make the celebration more public,” he says. For global fans looking for a glimpse of the action, the museum has released a video of Reflections.
