The Guardian had put up a page for the second of its “Great Modern Buildings” — the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. J.G. Ballard wrote the essay on Gehry’s famous building. Ballard might be the perfect writer to capture the essence of the shiny, undulating, alien masterpiece.
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is the world’s largest toy. Set among the drab streets of this rather depressing Spanish port, it throws up a fountain of light and good cheer that promises all the fun of a travelling circus - erecting its tent beside a disused railway yard in a run-down industrial city. In its own, self-defining way it is a masterpiece, and the fact that it is an art gallery is almost wholly irrelevant. The one thing that someone visiting the Bilbao Guggenheim can forget about is any thought of actually entering the building. Stay outside it, at a distance of about one hundred yards, and you will absorb all its audacity, magic, good humour and genius. And its infantilising charm. This is Disneyland for the media studies PhD.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater will be the big finish to the series, on October 19, with an interactive feature similar to the one for the Empire State Building.