It is one of the triumphs of the Bilbao Guggenheim that its interiors are anything but a letdown after the extraordinary impact of the titanium, limestone and glass exterior. Seen in isolation in a photograph, the shape-making of the outside might seem wilful. Seen in the context of Bilbao a tough industrial city surrounded by ranges of craggy hills it is an absolute and complete response to its setting, growing organically on the banks of the River Nervion as if somehow predestined to be there.
It is a building that could possibly have been conceived early in the century as a cubist/vorticist composition, but which could only have been built in the late 1990s because of its astonishing complexity of shape. It was almost undrawable Gehry worked mostly with models but an industrial computer system, similar to that used to design cars, scanned the models into computer form. This data was then used to manufacture the pieces of the building. Tellingly, Serra used the same system for his giant contribution to the museum.
The Guggenheim has one characteristic common to all great architecture: it appears and disappears as you travel the city; it is glimpsed down side streets, from bridges above and trains below, and, seen distantly, from the surrounding hills. It does not disappoint, from the first long view glimmering in the valley, right down to the ribs and beams and fittings of the interior.
For a "sketch", it is distinctly refined but emphatically not in the reductionist sense. Indeed, one work, by Lawrence Wiener, is an apt comment on the whole process, conceived in 1970 but freshly applied here. Giant letters on the wall of the biggest gallery, running from floor to ceiling, spell out the word REDUCTION. No way. Gehry is as big and tough with the details as he is subtle with the sculpting of the overall form. The framing for the glazing, and the steel girders supporting it from behind, are as unapologetically beefy as the mobile cranes of the container depot next door. Gehry works with solidity, emptiness and light, like all the great architects but he is not interested in making his building dematerialise into transparency. He shapes the great masses of his building like putty.
One of the best spaces is the main atrium, 146ft high, beneath what Gehry describes as the "rose" of the main part of the building. Looking up here, with the glazed stairwells and swirling solid forms leaning in on you, there is a sudden sense of the tall spiral of the original 1959 Guggenheim in New York by Frank Lloyd Wright. As you progress round the 19 galleries of the museum from this pivotal point, there are plenty more moments of epiphany. There are weird-shaped galleries with bare concrete floors, and there are "classical" rectilinear galleries with springy fake-wood floors a wonder substance, according to Gehry. One particularly fine moment is when, one level up, you look down the vast hull of the biggest gallery, seeing Serra, Judd and Oldenburg recede into the distance. Turn round, and there is a tiny little room containing drawings by Giacometti, Gorky and Elsworth Kelly. The immense telescoping of scale works perfectly.
