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> Guggenheim Bilbao Museum
Radiant, changing, different, immense, stunning, marvellous, impossible… the list of adjectives that can be used to describe this building is almost endless and they achieve no more than a fleeting description of what our feelings experience upon beholding what has undoubtedly become one of the major icons of the change of millennium. Pitched, folded, fitted and recumbent between the urban expanses and the old La Salve Bridge.
Conceived and raised in the heart of the quayside area of the Bilbao of the first half of the 20th century, on the site of a timber factory that received its raw materials from the world’s more exotic corners. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is in itself a work of art. The artistic creation of a genius and also a prodigy of engineering who was capable of turning into a reality what started out as a simple sketch on a serviette.
Is it possible for a building that was raised using aeronautical design programs and which itself attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors throughout the year to be an appropriate receptacle for art?. Is everything contained in this building art or has the container been given such importance that the content has ceased to be a priority?.
In response to those that view it as the generator of “Heisenberg uncertainties”, capable of impeding a suitable observation of the art, it suffices to enter the “Sala Fish” and let oneself go.
To ride the elevators and see how plastic arts and architectural art interact and are capable of mutual enhancement. If we want museums to be no more than simply bland “receptacles” that are transparent to visitors, then the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao does not fulfil those conditions, nor do the Vatican Museums, or the Louvre, or many of the world’s great museums.
Art, architecture, technology, urbanism, the avant-garde, new paths intertwined with already established art await us in that corner of Bilbao, nestling between the river, the city and La Salve Bridge. It was once the dream of an architect who looked down upon Bilbao from the heights of Artxanda and now today it is one of the 20th century’s most impressive and beautiful buildings.
Tel: 944 359 000
Opening times: 10,00 a.m. to 08,00 p.m.
Entrance: Adults 10 euros, students and old age pensioners
6 euros; groups 9 euros children free.
Closed: Monday