The Guggenheim effect
One of the 20th century’s most successful projects, completed on time and to budget and delivering transformative benefits to Bilbao and beyond, the spectacular Guggenheim Museum in Spain is a world‑class cultural institution that surpassed expectations. Alex Garrett investigates what went right and what its legacy has been.
Few projects have achieved a level of fame that has entered the language used by professionals in urban regeneration around the world. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, northern Spain, is one. Since its opening in 1997, Frank Gehry’s metal and limestone fantasy sculpture has transformed the economy and the outlook of the former industrial port city, giving rise to the expression ‘the Guggenheim effect’ or ‘the Bilbao effect’.
In any ranking of the most successful projects of the late 20th century, the Guggenheim deserves to figure – not just because it was built within its €100m budget and its five‑year timescale, but also because it has delivered benefits to Bilbao and the surrounding region that far exceeded expectations. It has attracted a steady one million‑plus visitors each year, two‑and‑a‑half times the 400,000 goal, and generated a huge boost to local tourism.
It has catalysed the transition from a post‑industrial economy with a history of shipbuilding and steel‑making to an economy that is now focused on culture. And in the process it has become one of the world’s most recognisable and admired buildings. It has inspired a legion of imitators in the form of urban planners seeking to elevate or reinvent their own city through a transformative architectural project.
In search of a catalyst
In 1990, the New York‑based Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation was looking for a European outpost to complement its Frank Lloyd Wright‑designed museum on Fifth Avenue. The city of Bilbao, meanwhile, was undertaking an urban renewal programme and was looking for a flagship cultural building to symbolise the changes taking place. It was an almost perfect match, and when the LA‑based practice of Frank Gehry, an emerging star of the architectural firmament, was chosen to design the building in 1991, the vision moved a step closer.
Juan Ignacio Vidarte has been director of the Guggenheim Bilbao since 1996; before that, he was part of the group that envisaged the plan, and then director of the entity set up to develop the project.
“From the beginning, this project had a large agenda in terms of goals, but the core of it was to be the catalyst of a transformation process that was already going on in the city of Bilbao and the wider region,” he explains.
The context was multi‑faceted. Spain had recently acceded to the EU; the Basque country was at its outer margin and the subject of an independence movement that had given rise, at its extreme, to terrorism.
“The museum was by no means the most significant project in terms of resources or in terms of investment,” says Vidarte, “but we aspired for it to be the catalyst that would make the whole plan happen.” The mandate was to develop a world‑class cultural institution, but one that would act as a driver of urban renewal and an agent of economic development, as well as a symbol of change.
The ambition was always to create an iconic building, says Vidarte, and that drew criticism from sceptics.
“To have some possibility of success, we had to look at the museum as a holistic experience, not just based on the contents. What type of building would make the experience of visitors coming to Bilbao worthwhile? Because Bilbao is not London, Paris or New York.”
The line‑up for the project consisted of a Bilbao‑based consortium representing the city hall, the provincial council and the regional government; the Guggenheim Foundation; Gehry’s firm; and Spanish engineering firm IDOM, brought in to manage the construction. It was a mixed bag, says Vidarte, spanning two national cultures, the public and private sectors, and three levels of government. With this potentially combustible partnership, and against a background of local controversy, with many arguing the money would be better spent elsewhere, it might have all been expected to go badly wrong.
Why didn’t it fail?
The reasons why large projects so often fail have been analysed and well documented. Bent Flyvbjerg, first BT professor at Saïd Business School, Oxford University, and Villum Kann, Rasmussen professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, carried out a study of some 3,000 such megaprojects in 2019. They found that only 0.2 per cent were completed on time and within budget and delivered the planned benefits. Among the most significant reasons identified for this were the failure to carry out rigorous cost/benefit appraisal; politicians wanting to undertake projects for the wrong reasons; a propensity for optimism; and changes to scope or budget over the duration of the project.
Flyvbjerg has studied the Guggenheim Bilbao project closely and says that all of these tripwires were avoided. “A common pitfall is that you start with the wrong budget,” he explains. “And no matter how good you are, if you don’t have the money, you can’t deliver the project, even if you’re the best architect in the world.”
The partnership of architect and client in this case was “an exceptionally good fit”, he says. “The client was ambitious and they were in government for a long time, so you had continuity. Too often, the person who makes the decision at the outset is not there in four years’ time and everything gets derailed. And they had an architect who actually listened to the client. So it didn’t happen by accident.”
Gehry’s philosophy is that if he promises a budget and a schedule to a client, he makes sure that he can keep to it, says Flyvbjerg. In return, the consortium gave Gehry the freedom to design the building without interference, a concept that the architect has referred to as “the organisation of the artist”. Establishing mutual trust, in other words, was a cornerstone of the successful relationship between the two key players. It was all in sharp contrast to the other big project Gehry was working on, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, where progress stalled for several years, the construction cost soared and the client forced big changes to the design.
An innovative construction
In Bilbao, IDOM had responsibility for delivering the construction on time and within budget. IDOM’s present‑day CEO Luis Rodríguez Llopis, who led its involvement 25 years ago, says: “Because of the schedule, it was designated as a fast‑track project, meaning that construction started before the whole design was completed. So we came to an agreement that any design that came after something was built must fit to the budget. Any change or any improvement should fit to the budget, and we had the complete help of Gehry and his team on that issue.”
In fact, says Vidarte, staying on time and within budget was embedded in the management of the project: “It was not just a nice side effect or additional goal, it was really a fundamental priority.”
Other specific techniques and innovations contributed to meeting this objective. The construction programme was divided into discrete packages that could be tendered simultaneously. Gehry’s use of CATIA software – originally developed by Dassault Systèmes for the aerodynamic design of aircraft fuselages – not only made the construction possible, but also highlighted potential conflicts, for example in plumbing or electrical wiring during the design phase, and enabled a significant cost saving during construction, says Flyvbjerg.
A stroke of good fortune came with the decision to use titanium for the thousands of panels that adorn the Guggenheim’s exterior and provide its characteristic reflective lustre. Titanium had never been used in a comparable construction project, says Rodríguez Llopis, and was one of two options under consideration alongside stainless steel.
“Our main concern was not that titanium wouldn’t work, because its role in the buildings was only aesthetic, and we checked its durability. Our main concern was the price.” Titanium is typically at least 10 times as expensive as stainless steel, but at that time, due to a geopolitical quirk – with Russia dumping a large quantity onto the market – it actually worked out cheaper to buy than stainless steel.
IDOM’s role cannot be underestimated. It provided the local construction know‑how and made critical calls on some of the materials and technology used. “Fittings such as faucets would be bronze in the US, but in Europe we use stainless steel. We showed that it would be feasible to use concrete block for construction in Bilbao,” says Rodríguez Llopis.
A shared vision
Undoubtedly the most important factor in the successful outcome was that the partners shared a vision and responsibility for making it happen.
“I think the diversity [among the partners], which could have been perceived as a liability, became a strength,” says Vidarte, “because everyone understood that success could not be achieved just by one of them pulling the strings.” Gehry, he says, was pragmatic enough to know which battles he needed to win and on which to concede. He understood that, “We’re not going to do the cheapest possible building; we have this amount of budget, and we’re going to spend the last euro of it. But we want to spend it on the best Gehry building that we can afford for that amount.”
The museum itself has never been short of accolades. American architect Philip Johnson called it “the greatest building of our time”. But the true measure of its success is the transformation it achieved for the city and region. Bilbao was not the first city to attempt to do so with the help of an iconic building, but it may have been the first to succeed so unequivocally.
“It’s not so easy to create the effect that you got in Bilbao,” says Flyvbjerg. “I think that’s related to the fact that it was not just a museum. It was part of a much bigger renewal programme involving a dozen different projects. That’s what you need, if you want that kind of effect.”
Vidarte adds his own take: “Sometimes it’s a cliché – a city has a problem and then they hire a famous architect, they do a flamboyant building and they think that’s done. But, of course, it’s not done because the building needs to serve a purpose, and that purpose needs to be fulfilled by having a sustainable model of operation. So you need to have not just the resources to do the building, but also a funding institution or developing institution that works.”
He concludes: “Buildings are for something – they’re not just landmarks.”
The Guggenheim Bilbao in numbers
$100m - construction cost
32,500m2 - space occupied by the building
33,000 - titanium panels fitted to the exterior
664 - concrete piles supporting the structure
4 - years to build (October 1993–October 1997)
400,000 - annual visitors forecast in feasibility study
1,170,669 - visitors in 2019 (pre‑pandemic)
€195.9m - economic activity generated in the Basque region
€67.9m - total income generated for the Basque Public Treasury
69% - visitors from outside Spain in 2019
Resources
Check out APM’s 2021 Dynamic Conditions for Project Success report; and listen to our podcast on ‘The Evolving Definition of Project Success’
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