Visiting Gehry in Northern Spain
/A documentary everyone should see is “Sketches of Frank Gehry” directed by Sydney Pollack. Gehry can be inspiring, but he can also make huge, ugly, expensive mistakes. I used to drive by one such mistake in Cambridge, Massachusetts on a regular basis. A beautiful, intriguing building which got him sued by MIT of all places for negligence – the complex filled with cracks, mold, drainage issues. But it sure was nice to drive by.
On a recent trip to Northern Spain, I had the pleasure of visiting two buildings by the paper architect in two very different settings: Bilbao and La Rioja.
Bilbao, of course, is home to the new Guggenheim museum and the building is magnificent. (My use of adjectives with Gehry is a bit appalling isn’t it?) But, seriously, this building is huge enough to hold gigantic installations and canvases. And the curator has done an incredible job of it. There are big rooms with just a few paintings – the first room visitors tend towards has a deKooning, a Rothko, a Still, and two Motherwells. It was perfect just to stand in the center of this room. Another has a long series of Twombly, “Nine Discourses on Commodus,” which made my heart stop – and in that same room, a Rauschenberg across from a large work filled with International Klein Blue across from a Warhol of Marilyn Monroe. Never before have I really appreciated Warhol. I find him boring (except when David Bowie plays him), but next to everyone else... I finally got it. Got it and appreciated it.
Upstairs were two exhibits: very late Rauschenberg and Anish Kapoor. The Rauschenberg rooms were filled with pieces he made out of scrap metal. The rooms were empty of people so perhaps I am alone in loving them, but I finally felt a sense of peace in my relationship with Rauschenberg, whose later work I had come to find repetitive. The Kapoor exhibit I had seen before in Boston. Still strange.
Before Bilboa we had hit the La Rioja area and visited the Marqués de Riscal Winery in Elciego which commissioned Gehry to design a hotel on their vineyard.
Here are the two Gehry buildings:
Elciego
Elceigo
The Elciego building is a hotel, not the winery, and someday it would be nice to stay there…eat at their fine restaurant and take advantage of their spa offerings while sipping wine and watching this beautiful countryside:
