This past summer I finally got to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, a town that has astonishingly reinvented itself from grungy sea port to a hip tourist and arts mecca.

… opened to the public in 1997, it was immediately hailed as one of the world’s most spectacular buildings in the style of Deconstructivism, although Gehry does not associate himself with that architectural movement. Architect Philip Johnson called it “the greatest building of our time”.

The museum’s design and construction serve as an object lesson in Gehry’s style and method. Like many of Gehry’s other works, it has a structure that consists of radically sculpted, organic contours. Sited as it is in a port town, it is intended to resemble a ship. Its brilliantly reflective titanium panels resemble fish scales …

Wikipedia – Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

more interesting photos of the Museum

It definitely looks better in photos than in real life.

I spent a couple of hours walking around the building. No two perspectives are alike.

Very cool. I like it.

A French hiker warned me that the highlight was the architecture. He was disappointed with the collections. And felt there was much wasted space. Form over function.

I didn’t get any further inside than the gift shop.

My favourite vantage was The Puppy, “a forty-three feet (12.4 m) tall topiary sculpture of a West Highland White Terrier puppy, executed in a variety of flowers on a steel substructure”.

It reminded me of the Spinx guarding the Pyramids. But a light-hearted variation.

Bilbao is the largest city in Basque Country.

Aside from the museum, about the only subject I hear about the region in Canadian mainstream media is Basque nationalism, especially the terrorist organization ETA.

… Since 1968, ETA has killed over 800 individuals and undertaken dozens of kidnappings. The group is proscribed as a terrorist organization by both the Spanish and French authorities as well as the European Union as a whole, and the United States. …

This wall painting in Bilbao to me seemed to celebrate ETA.

Perhaps I’m wrong. But compare the colour and style to the ETA symbol.

I have no sympathy for ETA. The Basques must work towards more independence, if they choose, through peaceful means.