La Chambre Des Reines

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"The randomness of the curves are designed to catch the light" - Frank Gehry - 

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"Frank Gehry's new Guggenheim Museum is a shimmering, Looney tunes, post-industrial, post-everything burst of American optimism wrapped in titanium"
- Herbert Muschamp - NY Times -

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"In its own, self-defining way it is a masterpiece, and the fact that it is an art gallery is almost wholly irrelevant. The one thing that someone visiting the Bilbao Guggenheim can forget about is any thought of actually entering the building. Stay outside it, at a distance of about one hundred yards, and you will absorb all its audacity, magic, good humour and genius." - J.G. Ballard - The Guardian -

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The Museum

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao - Spain, which opened in 1997, has quickly become one of the most famous museums in the world. Almost overnight Bilbao was transformed from a backwater to be avoided to a must see destination. Within the first years of the museum opening hundreds of thousands of tourist began to pour into the city just to see the Guggenheim. Bilbao was changed forever.

Like much of Frank Gehry's other work, the structure of the Guggenheim museum  consists of radically sculpted, organic contours. Sited as it is in a port town, it is intended to resemble a ship. Its brilliantly reflective panels resemble fish scales, echoing the other organic life (and, in particular, fish-like) forms that recur commonly in Gehry's designs, as well as the river Nervión upon which the museum sits.

Also in typical Gehry fashion, the building is uniquely a product of computer technology. Each of the titanium pieces of which the museum is comprised is unique, and all of them were designed using a computer program called "Catia", a 3-dimensional modeling program originally designed for the aerospace industry. This program made it feasible to build shapes that architects of earlier eras would have found nearly impossible to construct. 

The museum’s collection focuses primarily on American and European art from the 20th century, featuring styles such as Pop Art, Minimalism, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art and Abstract Expressionism, as well as artwork that contemporary European and American artists created specifically for the museum.

 

 

**Frank O. Gehry** born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto, Canada in 1929, Gehry has become a naturalized U.S. citizen. He is one of the most inventive and pioneering architects working today and a Pritzker Architecture Prize winner in 1989. His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. Many museums, companies and cities seek Gehry's services as a badge of distinction, beyond the product he delivers.

His best known works include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Walt Disney Concerhall in Los Angeles, Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic and his private residence in Santa Monica, California, which jump-started his career.

Source: Wikipedia and others