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.
Frank O. Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim is equally iconoclastic. With its ballooning shapes and titanium swirls, its colliding forms and unusual spaces, it has been described variously as a "postrationalist vision," an "inter-galactic spaceship," and a "titanium artichoke." There is a major difference, however, between the museum and the chapel. When I went to Ronchamp, in 1964, there were few other visitors. Most, judging by their cameras and sketchbooks, were architectural—not religious—pilgrims, students like myself. Corbu, as we called him, was one of the most important architects in the world. Yet his was hardly a household name; most Americans, pressed to identify a contemporary architect, would probably have named Frank Lloyd Wright, who had been dead for five years. People did go out of their way to visit buildings, but they were usually ancient works of art like Chartres Cathedral, or historical monuments like the Tower of London. Buildings by modern architects were objects of veneration for students, but they were not paid much attention by the public.
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."
Seattle got off the mark early. In 1996, before the Bilbao Guggenheim was even complete, Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft and a Jimi Hendrix fan, commissioned Gehry to design a rock-and-roll museum and performance venue in Seattle called the Experience Music Project. Gehry delivered a striking building whose bulbous shapes are variously covered in shimmering gold, silver, and purple stainless steel, and in red and blue aluminum shingles. These forms resemble the fragments of a giant, multicolored, broken guitar after a particularly violent rock concert.
Two years after the Bilbao Guggenheim opened, the Corcoran Gallery of Art announced that Gehry would build a large addition to its century-old building in Washington, D.C. The new design is a composition of sail-like metallic forms. Construction is slated to begin in late 2003, probably before the groundbreaking for Gehry's other major museum project: a forty-story-high Guggenheim on the East River in Lower Manhattan, with yet more titanium swirls. A Guggenheim museum in New York City designed by Frank Gehry would no doubt attract millions of visitors. But will people really flock to New Orleans to see the Grammy Hall of Fame—a recently announced project that, according to its backers, "will have the 'wow factor' not found at the Experience Music Project"? Will the new addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, which features a giant kinetic sunshade resembling a flapping pair of pterodactyl wings, bring in throngs? Will Toronto, soon to have a dramatic addition to its Royal Ontario Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind (whose Jewish Museum in Berlin attracted 350,000 visitors in two years before it even had any exhibits), be the new Bilbao? Maybe, maybe not. A year and a half after the opening of the Experience Music Project attendance was down by more than a third, leading to a layoff of 124 employees. This may be partly because of September 11, but it is worth noting that during the same period the number of visitors to the local art museum increased by more than a third.
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.
Rather than merely ponder the previous work of the three architects, the Corcoran commissioned each one to prepare a specific design. This kind of select competition, now the preferred way for choosing the architects of high-profile buildings, resembles a beauty pageant. With great fanfare a list of invited architects is announced. Their proposals are often exhibited, and sometimes the architects themselves give public presentations. The ranks of the competitors are winnowed. The anticipation is an important part of the publicity surrounding the proposed new building. When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art planned a major renovation and expansion, it invited five noteworthy architects to submit designs, including the ubiquitous Libeskind; Steven Holl, who was recently called "America's best architect" by Time magazine; and Thom Mayne, an avant-garde architect based in Los Angeles. Their proposals were eliminated in the first round of judging, leaving those of the Frenchman Jean Nouvel, whose best-known building is probably the Arab World Institute, in Paris, and Rem Koolhaas, a globe-trotting Dutch architect. Finally Koolhaas, who recently won a competition to design Seattle's new public library, was declared the winner.