Bilbao Itself

This city is remarkably evocative of Pittsburgh, where I lived and worked back in the late 70s and early 80s. While the 'Burgh has three rivers running through it, Bilbao has just the one, Rio Bilbao, a great deal narrower and tamer than the Allegheny, the Monongahela and the Ohio - but the city itself is surrounded by tall, steep hills all around, just like Pittsburgh; both have an industrial and ferrous history - Pittsburgh, steel, Bilbao metallurgy; and, remarkably, you get to each city proper via a tunnel from the airport! And then, Bilbao has the Guggenheim and Pittsburgh has the Warhol! (Well, the scale of each is different, but stay with me on the parallels!)

I read somewhere that a prominent architect or architectural critic wept when he first came upon the Bilbao Guggenheim. I didn't cry, but I thanked myself for making the effort to get here to see it. It's that impressive. (I asked Pilar, our guide to the Basque country mentioned in the earlier post, what stood here before Gehry's creation, and she told me it was the site of a lumber processing facility - an improvement, one would think.)

The spider (complete with egg sac!) and the puppy are strangely out of place, but an interesting touch.

Inside, (it is an art museum with galleries after all), is unsurprisingly vast, with soaring ceilings and swirls and swoops galore. In my estimation, Gehry pays more attention to "space" than the purpose of the space, but that said, the galleries are clean and huge - almost too huge as one spends as much time gazing at the "space" as at the content of the galleries in the "space".

Like Pittsburgh, Bilbao has made a remarkable transition from gritty and industrial to contemporary, attractive and comfortable. An observation - while Pittsburgh is known as "the Paris of the Ozarks", Bilbao is right down the road from the real Paris! Ah, Europe...

A tribute - back in the day, women hauled ships and barges up the river to the city's factories - by rope!