How This Building Saved its City (sort of)

this video was sponsored by nebula stay tuned for how to gain access to my companion video on bilbao's transformation this building saved this city from economic collapse the city is Bilbao Spain located just Inland of the Biscay Bay and home to about 350 000 people it was historically devoted to a thriving manufacturing industry this ship in the port of Bilbao is taking on a cargo of War Bound for England there to be made into Iron and Steel which starting in the 1980s was drying up fast where you can think about cities like Pittsburgh Glasgow Hamburg struggle with all the decline of the industrial fabric of the city the building that saved this place is a branch of the Guggenheim Museum an institution that you might know from their other iconic building in New York by Frank Lloyd Wright this satellite branch was designed by the other famous architect that's also named Frank Frank Gary the building hosts 19 galleries for the display of Art and is made of 42 875 titanium panels on the outside with lots of corners and flowing curves when this building was built in 1997 the city was in trouble they hired a Canadian architect to design a spectacular and iconic Museum to bring tourists and to jumpstart the economy the building was as much a work of art in and of itself as the collection featured inside for me the central idea goes back years to conversations I had with artists over the years about what is a museum to them the artist said we want the building to be have a presence in the community we wanted to be strong we want our we want our little mud pies in great buildings an iconic napkin sketch slowly solidified into a masterpiece of the 20th century and it worked the 100 million dollar building paid for itself in just eight months now one million tourists visit Bilbao every single year and it's created hundreds of jobs and saved the city from ruin the entire world took notice of this radical success story or at least that's the narrative that most people know and it's called the Bilbao effect and during the late 1990s and the early 2000s Architects and politicians alike were absolutely giddy about the prospect that a spectacular design could bring with it an economic windfall as other cities around the world tried to cash in Architects were given free reign to design the biggest the boldest designs that they could Frank Gary the architect of the Bilbao Museum was everywhere the success also spawned his work in my home city of Chicago's pritzker Pavilion what city wouldn't want to replicate the success build a museum save a city other Architects got into the action too and pretty soon starchitects and iconic buildings were all the rage pretty soon the excitement around potentially repeating the success waned as other attempts failed one right after the other the ordos museum in Mongolia by mad Studios empty Sheffield England's national Center for popular music by Nigel Coates closed only after a year and there are countless other examples they tried to replicate the Bilbo effect and they just built new buildings without understanding the conditions the structural systems that needed to happen so what made this situation such a success where so many others failed what is it about this place and this building that just seems to be like a magic recipe that just cannot be duplicated of course the answer is complicated and it has to do with the foundations laid down by the government coupled with clever Decisions by the architect to take advantage of local And Timely opportunities for the building to be as special as possible with a minimum of investment and resources I think the Guggenheim played a important role in showing how the city had changed it became kind of like the icing and the cake but the reasons how we got there the reasons all the work that was done before that kept kind of like being completely oversimplified so let's start with the building one of the defining features of the Guggenheim design are the collection of flowing curves that huddle together like a crumpled piece of paper normally these kinds of forms would be extremely difficult if not impossible to design and construct during the late 1990s but Gary's office was experimenting with a computer program that's normally used to make airplanes is called Catia what Katia allows folks to do is to work parametrically that means everything in the program is connected so that if you make a changes in the shape of the overall building all the little pieces that would be needed to construct that shape update automatically the power of this program meant that the steel elements of construction could be optimized for a limited set of connections so with just a few types of metal members all the shapes in this building can be made structure is just straight elements and then they designed this very kind of complicated joints but it's all built out of like straight elements that's really what you want here something where the end result appears complex but in reality the construction is much simpler even so this level of complexity would not have been possible beforehand but the design also took advantage of Lane expertise and available materials for this to work the building sits on a Prominent Point as you can see at the turn in the river this River was an important resource for the city and its growth it's Industries like ship construction could take advantage of the ports that made it possible there's also Rich iron ore deposits in the mountains that are surrounding the city so steel refinement was also a major industry and the steel was used to build the ships here so they have lots of expertise making complex steel shapes like they would in boats and the infrastructure was here to make all of this work what happened is working with local people they thought that this building in a way for thinking in the terms of architecture he thought it was very complicated but the people in bilwell because they had all this history of shipbuilding they have all the technology and all the capacity to say this actually is a very simple Building compared to building like a shape of this scale another aspect of the design which can exactly be duplicated are the titanium metal panels on the exterior titanium has a particular quality of reflection and color that is soft and distributed this color also shifts with the changing weather and when it gets wet it turns a warm tan during design titanium was twice as expensive as steel panels would have been still the team went with it thinning down the thickness of each one coincidentally though just prior to construction Russia who supplies the majority of the world's titanium dumped a ton of its reserved onto the market the price for titanium at the time was cut in half almost immediately almost every single ounce of it was bought for the construction of this building of course that made the price Skyrocket again but the folks here in Bilbao were able to take advantage titanium is lighter than steel already and the panels could be made even thinner this reduced the labor and the infrastructure needed for construction a single person could handle a panel instead of teams and equipment so they hired a local rock climbers to help install them the project manager sums up the thinking behind this ingenious solution with we found that it was easier to hire climbers and train them as crimpers than to hire crimpers and train them as climbers the shapes of the panel are also more systematic than it might appear at first eighty percent of the entire facade only uses four shapes the other 20 is one of 16 other options these shapes were cut Under Computer controlled Mills so they're perfect and the connection detail leaves just enough room for the whole thing to move the amount that it needs to with the changing temperatures in the Wind so the design itself took advantage of timely and local opportunities even though the architect was imported from across the globe the design itself is particularly contextual to both its time and its location some even make the connection then it kind of looks like some of the boats that used to be made here on the interior large light-filled atriums organize the center with over 11 000 square meters of exhibition space is distributed between 19 galleries 10 of the galleries are more box-like and these are the ones that are made of limestone on the outside the other nine galleries are actually inside the titanium forms the largest is 30 meters wide and 130 meters long and it houses a permanent installation called the matter of time by the artist Richard Sarah but many would argue that this building itself is only a piece of a much larger puzzle that includes countless infrastructural projects and political advocacy that ensured the success of the building prior to even its construction while these things aren't so easy to photograph they're just as much a key component in the success of the building and the revitalization of the city and they too were particularly Savvy in 1989 The Basque government commissioned the creation of a strategic plan for the revitalization of Metropolitan Bilbao and the plan was completed in 1992. City needed to reinvent themselves there was a lot of social problems a lot of unemployment some places went to up to 35 percent unemployment the city at that point figured out four strategies or four elements that they needed to change the city two of them were physical changes and then two of them were more uh abstract changes so one was having access to external connectivity and internal Mobility uh there was an urban and environmental regeneration there was a lot of issues with the way like the industrial processes and the effects that they had in the city and then the two other ones was investment in human resources and technology and the last one was the central like a cultural centrality and that in that last fourth one is where the Guggenheim plugged in addition to the museum other important Architects have been engaged like Santiago calatrava and Caesar pelli to further reinforce bilbao's Central presence in the world of contemporary architecture Bridges were built both literally and metaphorically between the people of different backgrounds and languages the Guggenheim was actually commissioned and paid for by the government that's how much they believed in this plan it costs everyone in the region about a hundred dollars of their tax dollars to build and of course the building was only a piece of this so a major part of this plan included revamping its public transportation as well as ensuring the city is a walking and biking Paradise the tram system was implemented prior to the construction in the museum and it crosses the city center and links many of the main tourist attractions the subway system was designed by the famous British architect Norman Foster the entrances emerged from the ground like Karas sandworms that you entered to descend down the escalator this whole system was finished a few years before the Guggenheim interestingly too the region has an important history of already attracting a certain amount of tourists as an important destination for Wine and Food wow had a lot of cultural elements before the Guggenheim he has a very strong Museum of Fine Arts that was very known it has the Ariaga theater it had all a lot of Institutions that were kind of like very important in the fabric of the city so the Guggenheim he wasn't the building that introduced culture it was just a building that added to that cultural centrality and I think what it did is like showcase some of the other institutions that were already in the city so this place isn't just about serving the tourists the tourism industry serves the people that live here but there's also more to live for and to be proud of here than just this shiny spectacular buildings that you can see on a short trip it's a give and take between the tourists and the residents the tourism wouldn't Thrive unless this was a great place to live and this wouldn't be a great place to live without all the stuff that makes it such a great place to spend a few days man I had an absolute blast in dilbao and talking with Iker about the Guggenheim as well as the city's transformation as a whole I gathered a ton of content and a lot of it didn't even make it into this video so I created an entirely new companion video for those of you that are eager to learn a little bit more it's exclusively uploaded on the streaming service nebula which if you didn't already know is a little something that I've been working on with a lot of your other favorite creators it's where I and channels like Johnny Harris not just bikes and City beautiful and dozens more upload our regular YouTube videos early and we share the videos where we experiment with topics and techniques that aren't strangled by the YouTube algorithm just like going a little bit more into depth into the Bilbao video that I mentioned there are thousands of these kinds of videos over on nebula and they're all completely ad free nebula also features exclusive originals and game shows like jet lag and there's also courses where your favorite creators give you behind the scenes access into how to be a creator so click on the link in the description and watch that extended interview sign up for nebula it costs only two dollars and fifty cents per month when signing up for a year with my code you'll unlock access to the secret treasures of your favorite YouTube creators and you'll be supporting me to be able to continue making content that explores the depths of the built environment if you enjoyed this video please hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already leave a comment with your thoughts about Bilbao and Gary's Miracle while you're here check out some of these other videos which come out every other Thursday see you over there thank you

Channel: Stewart Hicks

Views: 266,418

Keywords: architecture, design, architecture student, architecture design, architecture lecture for beginners, architecture 101, architecture documentary, architecture concept, architecture theory, stewart hicks, architecture talk, urban design, chicago, guggenheim bilbao museum, frank gehry, bilbao (city/town/village), guggenheim museum bilbao (museum)

Id: M5-0EYkBnOc

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2023