Guggo's 10th Anniversary

This note appeared today at Yahoo News:

Bilbao's Guggenheim celebrates 10 years of landmark museum

by Elise Santafe
Fri Oct 19, 3:33 PM ET

Bilbao celebrated the 10th anniversary Friday of its futuristic Guggenheim Museum, which helped transform this industrial Basque city into a cultural capital, with the inauguration of a massive new work of art outside.

The "Red Arches", a huge metal structure over La Salve bridge next to the titanium shingles and swooping form of the museum itself, was lit up in a night-time ceremony.

"It's a kind of door," said French painter and sculpture Daniel Buren who designed it.

"What I did was accentuate this idea of a door: you enter or you leave the town through a door, which is also related to an image that everyone has of doors which open and close all towns, at least in the Middle Ages."

He said the red was used "to give character to the bridge," and because "it's a colour that can go with the silver and gold" of the museum itself.

The "Red Arches" joins two other permanent works around the Guggenheim -- "Puppy," a dog in flowers by American Jeff Koons which "guards" the museum, and a giant spider by the French artist Louise Bourgeois.

As part of its 10th anniversary celebrations, the museum is also showing a retrospective of US art called "Art In The USA: 300 Years of Innovation" that features some 200 works from 120 artists. It will run until April 12, 2008.

The Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim has drawn an average of one million visitors per year, far above the 250,000 to 500,000 expected by authorities when it opened in 1997.

Its success, dubbed the "Bilbao Effect", has led officials around the world to hire famous architects -- or "starchitects" -- to build landmark buildings in the hope of putting their city on the map.

"The Bilbao effect is the transforming power of a cultural infrastructure on the development of a city," in a "urbanistic, economic, social and even psychological" way, explained the Guggenheim's director, Juan Ignacio Vidarte.

Officials from "almost 100 towns and cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, have come to Bilbao to seek inspiration, without necessarily intending to copy it," he told AFP.

But in some, the idea "has not always been understood," he warned.

Some believe that "in a town in difficulty, it is enough to create some kind of spectacular structure by an architect who is somewhat well-known, without looking into its content and the problems of the town."

The local government of the independence-minded Basque region bid for the right to house a satellite of the Guggenheim Foundation in the early 1990s as a way to boost its economy, which was suffering from the decline of its metalwork and shipbuilding industries.

The museum was the centrepiece of an urban renewal project that includes a new subway system with caterpillar-like entrances by Norman Foster and a glass bridge and sleek new airport by Santiago Calatrava.

The Guggenheim Foundation's network of museums -- which also include outposts in Berlin, Las Vegas and Venice -- share a permanent collection that rotates amongst them.

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