One way to transform a city is to build a signature building. Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, on the 'Bilbao effect'
Apart from Sydney and its Opera House, it's hard to think of a city which has become quite so synonymous with a single modern building as Bilbao and its Guggenheim Museum, designed by wacky American architect Frank Gehry.
Gehry had barely built anything of consequence before winning the commission to provide Bilbao with a sensational new emblem. Opened in 1997, it attracted 1.3 million visitors in its first year, generating buckets of revenue for hotels, restaurants and shops in the once-depressed Basque industrial city.
The image was certainly arresting. With its swirling forms clad in shimmering titanium, it has been variously described as a "postrationalist vision", an "inter-galactic spaceship" and a "titanium artichoke". But whatever tag one hangs on it, there can be no doubt about its impact. It became the new badge of Bilbao.
"Emblematic" is a word frequently used in Bilbao: the transformation of a city, a new architectural exhibition at the Guinness Storehouse, which has drawn crowds in Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Lisbon, Cannes, Genoa, Shanghai and São Paolo over the past five years; that in itself is a measure of Bilbao's international standing.
The exhibition offers an eclectic mix of architectural models, photographs and drawings of major projects either built or under construction in the former iron-and-steel port city at the base of the Bay of Biscay. And what it shows is the value of weaving strikingly modern buildings and transportation systems into the urban fabric.
Its centrepiece, inevitably, is a model of the Guggenheim Museum showing its setting on the banks of the River Nervion, the big bridge next door to it and the fabric of the city beyond.
What it doesn't show is how Frank Gehry's fortunes soared on the strength of his Bilbao project - suddenly, cities were falling over themselves to get a Gehry building.
Or a museum, art gallery, bridge or concert hall designed by other high-profile architects such as Daniel Libeskind, Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas, who built their reputations by winning competitions, as Atlantic magazine noted. Someone called them the "competition show dogs" of architecture today.
Critic Giovanni Valle has noted that cities such as Seattle, Lisbon, Panama, Chicago, Jerusalem, Venice and Dundee all lined up for "a piece of the Gehry miracle - the transformation of cities into international symbols of art and culture through architecture, a phenomenon which has simply come to be known as the 'Bilbao effect' ".
In the past, as critic Witold Rybczynski observed, people would go out of their way to see great buildings such as Chartres Cathedral or the Tower of London. What's different now is that stupendous modern structures are turning up trumps for cities in the cut-throat competition for inward investment by highly-mobile global capital.
When it came to building a new concert hall for Philadelphia, a modest proposal by Robert Venturi was scrapped as more and more cities went for "trophy buildings". So the budget was increased from $60 million to $265 million and New York-based Rafael Viñoly was hired to "deliver the requisite 'wow factor': an immense glass vault", in Rybczynski's words.
"We live in a changing world. Large cities, products of an industrial age, are giving way to a new kind of urban centre operating in a knowledge-based economy," as the Bilbao exhibition catalogue says. And to thrive in this modern marketplace, cities must show that they have such essential features as quality of life and capacity to innovate.
That is recognised in Dublin, too. Why else would we have had an international competition for a new monument on the Nelson's Pillar site in O'Connell Street, or commission Calatrava to provide the city with two new bridges? The Spire has been hailed by critic Aaron Betsky as "probably the best civic monument" since the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC.
As for the James Joyce Bridge linking Blackhall Place with Usher's Island, let's just say that its inclined parabolic arch and glass deck is mirrored by another Calatrava project, the Zubi-Zuri footbridge in Bilbao; lit at night, it would be difficult to tell them apart. The other Dublin bridge, between Macken Street and North Wall Quay, has yet to materialise.
The Bilbao exhibition shows that the Guggenheim is just one of an impressive array of projects under way or already fully functioning in the Basque city. These include the huge Euskalduna concert and conference hall (1999), designed by Spanish architects Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacios, who were inspired by the shipbuilding yard that stood on the site.
Calatrava, a Catalan architect-engineer based in Zurich, designed a new terminal and control tower for Bilbao airport; its central area has been likened to a soaring bird. And Norman Foster did the cavernous stations for the city's metro - their glazed grub-like entrances at street level have become known as fosteritos. Popularity at last for Lord Foster!
Bilbao has also built the first phase of a tramway system - another "must-have" for competing cities - running for five kilometres along the waterfront, where Cesar Pelli, who designed Canary Wharf in London, has master-planned a huge residential, commercial, leisure and cultural complex in a redundant dockland area known as Abandoibarra.
Pelli's plan includes a glazed 31-storey tower to serve as the new headquarters of the Regional Council of Bizkaia. The council is also having Bilbao's public library refurbished and extended, with a glazed wing reflecting the ornate 19th-century architecture of its existing palace. The exhibition includes a beautiful timber model of the two buildings.
The old Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts (1908) is also being enlarged, proving that art feeds on architecture. As if to underline that some kind of critical mass has been achieved, the city has developed a new trade exhibition centre consisting of a tower and six vast pavilions containing 115,000 sq m (1.238 million sq feett) of floorspace.
Following the international trend, a new port with twice the capacity is being built further downstream and this will put Bilbao in the first rank of European ports. There's a large aerial view of the city in the exhibition, but it's quite difficult to find things on it - including even Bilbao's emblem, the Guggenheim Museum.