Bibao Effect

Bibao Effect

Bibao Effect

The story is, “by now, familiar to almost everyone: A sleepy, seaside, former industrial city in Northern Spain gets a new museum housed in a building already called--on its completion at the end of the 20th century--the most important building of the 21st. The city, of course, is Bilbao; the museum is Frank O (Beascoechea, 1999, 194). Gehry's Guggenheim. Virtually overnight, the small city became one of the most popular destinations in Europe. From all reports, Bilbao is rapidly metamorphosing from a sort of one-hit wonder to a genuinely vibrant city with restaurants, nightlife, theatre, and art. Gehry's radical, shimmering metal building has become a source of immense civic pride.

Call it the Bilbao Effect, though it predates the Guggenheim there by at least a few thousand years. Great architecture should be the centerpiece of urban space. Whether religious, governmental, commercial, or cultural, buildings define their cities; think of the Pantheon, of the Forbidden City--more than one building, I know--of any one of a thousand Parisian buildings and monuments, of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. The critics who complain about the Bilbao Guggenheim's sometimes lackluster collection and exhibitions--the same criticism has been leveled at Los Angeles' just-as-impressive Getty Center--do have a point, but they also miss the point (Beascoechea, 1999, 194). The point is the building as art, not just as a house for art. Architecture is the only truly public art form left. Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Rem Koolhaas: they are the cathedral builders of our time. Not since Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe have so many architects become so nearly household names (Piñeiro, 1979, 291).

Our science center, when complete, will pay homage to all of these. Designed as a vast, transparent cantilever over the confluence of the three rivers, his plan is already being spoken of as a sort of truncated bridge-about-to-take-flight. Maybe more accurately, it resembles a bridge that's building itself. In renderings of the design, the immense glass box at the end of the cantilevered section seems to frame the ramp onto the West End Bridge further up the Ohio River (Montero, 2000, 142). On the other side, the front elevation is a combination of glass and natural space, at once organic and carefully controlled. I can't help but think that his design is equally homage to what is currently the most important piece of Western Pennsylvania architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, also cantilevered over water, also a study in transparency broken by horizontal bands and brought into relief by one off-center vertical mass. And as with Wright's work, the principle organizing principle is volume and uninterrupted space.

Despite all of this, Nouvel's work is decidedly new and fitting with an ideal image of Pittsburgh. Some years ago, the designers of the Pittsburgh International Airport talked about using windows and openness to contrast the tired image of ours as a smoky, dark city. Nouvel does much the same (Olaizola, 2002, 22-41). His transparent building will highlight the city itself, the sky, Mount ...