KEVIN KITTREDGE The Roanoke Times

Associated Press | File

KEVIN KITTREDGE The Roanoke Times

"The Bilbao Effect" continues 12 years after the Guggenheim's opening, with new construction ongoing around the museum.

BILBAO, Spain -- It looms on the Spanish skyline like a beached whale or an ocean liner run aground.

The Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which opened in 1997, almost instantly became one of the most famous buildings in the world. It is often linked stylistically with Roanoke's Taubman Museum of Art, designed by one-time Gehry associate Randall Stout.

Bilbao was the last stop on my weeklong journey last month through Northern Spain.

I had spent most of my time prowling through ancient buildings on the old pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela -- known in Spain simply as "El Camino," or "The Road."

Bilbao, population 350,000, is not on the Camino. It is a former industrial seaport in the Basque Country that has recently reinvented itself as a tourist destination -- as Roanoke longs to do.

Since the Guggenheim opened, by numerous accounts, Bilbao has been transformed. The "Bilbao Effect" has spurred hundreds of millions of dollars in new development in the ancient city, which is now a destination for 1 million or so tourists a year.

Evidence of ongoing transformation is easy to find in Bilbao. The blocks around the museum are an obstacle course of cranes and worksites. And an as-yet unfinished high-rise is going to spoil any future pictures of the museum posed prettily against the hills.

I was in Bilbao to catch a plane to Portugal, and then for home. But almost no one comes to Bilbao anymore without visiting the museum -- and I wasn't about to, either.

I had seen plenty of pictures of the Guggenheim. But pictures are two-dimensional, and the Guggenheim emphatically is not.

Pictures can't really convey the way the building juts out over you as you approach.

And they seldom show you how the Guggenheim snuggles up close to the Nervion River, or the elegant glass-bottomed footbridge by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, or La Salve Bridge, which from some angles seems to channel traffic out of the Viscayan hills straight into the museum itself.

Nor do they show you how the mountains rise up across the river -- which makes Bilbao look a little bit like Roanoke.

What's inside

I had heard the Guggenheim's artworks were the least of the reasons for visiting it. So I arrived there planning to breeze right through, then move on to the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and the commercial district, before heading back across the Calatrava bridge to the medieval quarter for my evening meal.

Instead, I stayed till closing time. The Guggenheim's exhibits -- from the steel mazes by San Francisco-born artist Richard Serra big enough to get lost in, to canvases by Picasso and Cezanne -- sucked me in.

The exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright, architect of the radish-shaped New York City Guggenheim, which opened half a century ago, seemed perfect for the Bilbao Guggenheim. Wright was perhaps modern America's first starchitect. He was also one of the first to be criticized for designing a museum building so dazzling it overwhelmed the works within.

The same can't really be said of the Bilbao Guggenheim. Inside, the Guggenheim trades eye-popping curves for functionality. The non-exhibit spaces are very fine for taking a break and gazing out at the city -- but they don't really distract from the exhibits themselves.

The Wright exhibit held my attention for at least an hour, in spite of the obvious shortcoming that none of the architect's completed buildings could actually be there. Instead, the exhibit hooked me with its viewer-friendly assortment of drawings, models and video projections of his buildings -- from the famous Fallingwater, a house built atop a waterfall in Pennsylvania, to one of Wright's few skyscrapers, the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla., where I was born. (My father, George Kittredge, an oil company engineer at the time, once worked in the tower.)

The museum also featured art videos and modernist paintings from the permanent collection on the top floor.

They were the only paintings I saw, though I might have missed some. The Guggenheim itself is a sculpture -- and most of what I saw inside was, too.

A new appreciation

Will the Taubman Museum of Art ever draw a million tourists a year, as the Bilbao Guggenheim does?

Probably not. The Guggenheim, after all, is three times the size of Roanoke's museum and has much more exhibit space. It is backed by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which also has museums in Germany, Venice and New York, and is planning more. Admission to the Bilbao Guggenheim, by the way, was 11 Euros, or about $16.50, compared to $10.50 for the Taubman.

But wouldn't a fan of the Bilbao Guggenheim -- and I'm one -- also enjoy a trip to Roanoke, to see what one of Gehry's proteges has pulled off?

Well ... heck, yes. Or at least, I did. Home again, I found myself looking at Stout's museum with brand new -- and in some ways, newly appreciative -- eyes.

One thing that struck me is just how much the Guggenheim and the Taubman have in common. As architects, Gehry and Stout use the same vocabulary, which has led some to accuse Stout of plagiarism.

They both, for example, are fond of sculptural forms in steel and glass. The Roanoke museum's profile has been compared to the shape of a steam locomotive. In Gehry's Bilbao masterpiece, it's easy to detect the general outline of an ocean-going vessel.

And both architects let the underpinnings of their buildings show -- although Gehry seems to do it more often. The Guggenheim within is an elegant framework of steel beams and at least one catwalk leading between galleries.

The entire Bilbao Guggenheim experience, in fact, is not for the squeamish. From that glass-bottomed Calatrava footbridge to the outside staircase zig-zagging up to the Le Salva Bridge sidewalk (and I used both) to that catwalk, there are lots of stomach-clenching heights.

And that leads me to what, in my mind, is one of the biggest differences between the Bilbao Guggenheim and the Taubman.

The Taubman just feels warmer somehow, with its glowing glass staircase and wood and travertine floors (admittedly it was drizzly and chilly the whole time I was in Bilbao). Compared to Gehry's titanium exterior walls, which have been compared to fish scales, Stout's rust-colored zinc seems softer, more sedate -- like Roanoke itself.

And for my money, there is nothing in the Guggenheim like the view of Roanoke from the top of the Taubman staircase, looking out on the H&C Coffee sign, the Dr Pepper sign and the Mill Mountain Star, through that transparent mountain of glass.

But maybe I'm just glad to be home.