The Bilbao Effect

A  thriving cultural sector is an essential part of what makes a city great, along with green spaces and immigrants who bring renewal and vigour to city life, according to a recent study by McKinsey, a consultancy. The opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in northern Spain (pictured) in 1997, 20 years after the Pompidou Centre, shows how an imaginatively designed museum commissioned by an energetic mayor can help turn a city around.

Buildings are frequently regarded as profit opportunities, so creating "scarcity" or a certain degree of uniqueness gives further value to the investment. The balance between functionality and avant-gardism has influenced many property developers. For instance, architect-developer John Portman found that building skyscrape hotels with vast atriums—which he did in various U.S. cities during the 1980s—was more profitable than maximizing floor area

In 1955 Le Corbusier built the chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp, a remote site in the Jura Mountains near the Swiss border. The building had curved, roughly plastered concrete walls and a swelling roof that resembled a nun's wimple. These sculptural features challenged the functionalist dogma—to a large extent devised by the architect himself—of the white-shoebox International Style. After Ronchamp modern architecture was never quite the same.

Whatever effect the Bilbao phenomenon will have on the way that tourists choose their destinations, it has already had a major influence on the way that clients, especially museums, choose their architects. In 1967, when the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., was planning an addition to its building, it solicited portfolios from a dozen prominent architects, and after narrowing the list down to four (Kevin Roche, Philip Johnson, Louis I. Kahn, and I. M. Pei), museum officials visited the finalists' buildings as well as their offices. Only after the choice was made did the winner—Pei—get down to work on a design. Three years ago, when the Corcoran went looking for an architect, it, too, had a short list: Gehry, Libeskind, and Calatrava. Where Gehry billows, Libeskind zigs and zags. The Jewish Museum, his first major building, resembles a fragmented Star of David. This seemed to many a stroke of genius when the building was completed, in 1999, but it turns out that Libeskind is simply partial to spiky, agitated forms. His winning design for an extension to the Denver Art Museum was described by The New York Times as a "dramatic glass-and-titanium jumble of rectangles and triangles." Calatrava's stylishly engineered structures, in contrast, resemble sun-bleached skeletons; they are "techno-Gothic," according to one commentator.

Today's public definitely knows about the Bilbao Guggenheim; since its opening, in 1997, it has attracted almost five million visitors. According to the Financial Times, in its first three years the museum has helped to generate about $500 million in economic activity and about $100 million in new taxes. On seeing the titanium artichoke, other cities have been saying, "We want one of those."