Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

구겐하임 빌바오 미술관

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art in Bilbao, a city in the Basque Country of northern Spain. It was designed by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry and opened on 18 October 1997. The building sits beside the Nervión River, on land that used to be part of the city's old industrial port.

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At a glance

Country: Spain
Location: Bilbao, Spain
Built: 1997
Height: 50 m
Type: Museum

Quick answers

Where is Guggenheim Museum Bilbao?

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is in Bilbao, Spain.

When was Guggenheim Museum Bilbao built?

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was built in 1997.

How tall is Guggenheim Museum Bilbao?

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is about 50 m tall.

Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad, curving museum that transformed Bilbao.

Instead of straight walls, the museum is made of swooping, curving shapes covered in thin, shiny titanium. Critics called it a dream ship, and its panels are often compared to fish scales. The building became so famous that it drew millions of visitors and helped turn Bilbao from a struggling industrial city into a place people travel across the world to see. People now use the phrase 'the Bilbao effect' for a city that changes its fortunes with one bold building.

How it was built

Gehry's curves were so complicated that they were planned with CATIA, computer software first made for designing aircraft. The computer worked out the shape and strength of each part, which helped the builders finish the museum on time and on budget, something rare for such an unusual building. The outside is covered with about 33,000 titanium plates, each only 0.4 millimetres thick, together weighing just 60 tonnes. The museum stands on concrete piles driven about 14 metres down into the bedrock.

What's inside

The heart of the museum is a tall, bright atrium crowned by a metal skylight shaped like a flower. Curving walkways, glass lifts and stairs connect the galleries around it. The biggest gallery is about 130 metres long and has no columns at all. It holds Richard Serra's The Matter of Time, a group of giant rust-coloured steel sculptures you can walk through. The other galleries change their exhibitions often, showing art from around the world.

Visiting today

You can walk all the way around the museum and see a different shape from every side. Outside stand some famous artworks. Puppy by Jeff Koons is a dog about 12 metres tall covered in living flowers that guards the main square. Maman by Louise Bourgeois is a bronze spider almost 9 metres tall standing by the river. At one end, the museum even wraps around the La Salve bridge, making the bridge look like part of the building.

Fun facts

Its success gave rise to the term 'Bilbao effect' for cities reviving through bold architecture.
The titanium skin of the whole museum weighs only about 60 tonnes, because the plates are thinner than a credit card.
Gehry nicknamed the bright central atrium The Flower because of its shape.
Puppy, shaped like a West Highland terrier and covered in flowering plants, is described by the museum as the world's largest flower sculpture.
The huge spider sculpture Maman was made as a tribute to the artist's mother, who was a weaver.
In its first three years, almost 4 million people visited the museum.