Chillida is rightfully featured in Bilbao’s Guggenheim. That’s two of his sculptures on the deck of the museum designed by Frank Geary. What a combo. Geary died the other day. He was a hero of my father’s. They were just about the same age. When we first visited northern Spain Bilbao was described in the tourist books as the armpit of Spain, an industrial hub with a port of the Bay of Biscay. We drove right by it.
When the MAG organized an art tour of Spain in the late nineties the Guggenheim there was brand new and my parents signed up. My father filled a sketch book with drawings of the building. An article about the architect in today’s paper mentioned that the first building Geary designed was for Louis Danziger in 1965, a work/live space on Melrose Avenue in LA. I had just called attention to Danziger a few posts back when research the artwork he did for a Bud Powell 45. Funny how everything comes together eventually.
We have been to Bilbao a couple of times since and we love the city. The museum, Geary’s masterpiece, transformed the working class city. We want to go back. Architecture aside, I was just thinking how nice it is to live in a spot where we can hear the train whistles downtown, the jet skis on the lake, the motorcycles on Kings Highway and the muffled roar of the bay bridge.
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