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Architecture of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was designed by architect Frank Gehry to serve as an architectural landmark that would be recognisable worldwide. Its audacious, sculptural lines have inspired many to praise it as a forerunner of 21st-century architecture. The building comprises a number of interconnected volumes: some are sandstone orthogonal shapes that offer a solid foundation, while other titanium-clad sections curve and flow in glimmering light. These volumes combine with glass walls, which lend an air of transparency to the entire building. The museum's three levels of exhibition space are organised around a central atrium — the true heart of the museum and one of the most acclaimed features of Gehry's design.
An impressive “metallic flower” skylight filters daylight into the warm, welcoming space below, which offers visitors a relaxing environment for reflection on and preparation for their encounter with modern and contemporary art.
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 |  | The Guggenheim Collections
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum owns one of the world's foremost collections of avant-garde art, and many other fundamental modern and contemporary artists. Throughout the 20th century, the acquisitions program of the New York museum has maintained its constant commitment to the art of our time. Its initial nucleus focused on “non-objective art,” particularly the works of Vasily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Amedeo Modigliani, and Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, among others. Later, the collection was augmented with the works of other artists important to the course of 20th-century art:
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Paul Klee, Constantin Brancusi, Juan Gris, Piet Mondrian, and numerous works of German Expressionism and Surrealism; masterpieces of the French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements, including works by Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; a large number of American Minimalist and Conceptualist works; and the impressive donation of 200 of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs marked the beginning of a growing collection of contemporary photography.
Public Presentation of the Guggenheim Collections and Temporary Exhibitions
The fact that the permanent holdings of the Guggenheim Collection are shared among New York, Venice, Bilbao, and Berlin is unique in the art world and has given rise to a new model of museum alliances. By sharing its holdings with the other Guggenheim collections and exhibiting them on a rotating basis, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao offers its visitors multiple views of 20th-century art.
The combination of Permanent Collection and temporary exhibitions offers visitors a coherent, complementary, and dynamic program reflecting modern and contemporary art scenes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
VELUX and Guggenheim
VELUX is sponsor of The Visitors Service at the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum - a sponsorship which aims at allowing the Museum to offer the best possible service to the more than one million visitors passing through the gates of the museum every year.
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