It felt, for quite some time there, like the age of Frank Gehry would nev­er end. But now that the lat­est defin­ing fig­ure of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture — or tech­ni­cal­ly, Cana­di­an-Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture — has died at the age of 96, the time has come to ask when, exact­ly, his age began. Or rather, with which build­ing: Walt Dis­ney Con­cert Hall in Los Ange­les? The Louis Vuit­ton Foun­da­tion in Paris? The rad­i­cal ren­o­va­tion of his own hum­ble San­ta Mon­i­ca home often cit­ed at the ori­gin point of the metal­lic, delib­er­ate­ly incon­gru­ous, often near­ly alien aes­thet­ic now rec­og­nized around the world? Accord­ing to the B1M video above, it is to the Guggen­heim Muse­um Bil­bao we must look to if we wish to under­stand the archi­tec­ture of Frank Gehry — and much else besides.

The Guggen­heim Bil­bao was a chal­leng­ing project when it was first con­ceived in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties, but then, Bil­bao was a chal­lenged set­ting. Once a pros­per­ous port city, the Basque metrop­o­lis had fall­en on hard times indeed, rapid­ly dein­dus­tri­al­iz­ing with­out much in the way of alter­na­tive appeal. Bil­bao’s slight his­to­ry with tourism went back to the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, but for many Spaniards, the prospect of turn­ing the place into an inter­na­tion­al des­ti­na­tion seemed remote at best. Still, an ambi­tious devel­op­ment plan was devised involv­ing new infra­struc­ture, includ­ing the city’s first metro sys­tem, cen­tered around a branch of New York’s Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um.

With its orig­i­nal Fifth Avenue loca­tion designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (Gehry’s pre­de­ces­sor in the cul­tur­al role of the one archi­tect, or “star­chi­tect,” of whom every­one has heard), that insti­tu­tion had a cer­tain degree of expe­ri­ence with dar­ing build­ing designs. Famil­iar though the look of its gleam­ing sculp­tur­al curves may be today, actu­al­ly con­struct­ing their non-Euclid­ean geo­met­ric forms in real­i­ty required tech­nolo­gies nev­er before wide­ly employed in archi­tec­ture, includ­ing the ear­ly 3D-mod­el­ing sys­tem CATIA (this video’s spon­sor, inci­den­tal­ly). Nor was the search for the right exte­ri­or tex­ture to reflect Bil­bao’s dis­tinc­tive­ly cloudy skies espe­cial­ly straight­for­ward, but it did ben­e­fit from good tim­ing: Gehry deter­mined that tita­ni­um could do the job, where­upon the mass decom­mis­sion­ing of Sovi­et sub­marines hap­pened to dump a great deal of that mate­r­i­al on the mar­ket.

In these tech­no­log­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic ways, the Guggen­heim Bil­bao was a prod­uct of its time. As it hap­pened, it and the asso­ci­at­ed rede­vel­op­ments did, in fact, breathe new life into the city, which has inspired a decades-long “Bil­bao effect” on projects around the world with sim­i­lar goals, some of them also fea­tur­ing Gehry-designed cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions. As the B1M host Fred Mills puts it, “Telling a sto­ry like this real­ly is like read­ing out a list of things that we, today, take for grant­ed: the idea that a muse­um could be an inter­na­tion­al tourist attrac­tion, the tech­nol­o­gy, the 3D design.” And, like most archi­tects, Gehry is sur­vived by not just his built lega­cy, but also a series of projects not yet com­plete — includ­ing the Guggen­heim Abu Dhabi, sched­uled to open its doors next year.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Gehry’s Vision for Archi­tec­ture

An Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of Sagra­da Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Auda­cious Church That’s Been Under Con­struc­tion for 142 Years

On the Impor­tance of the Cre­ative Brief: Frank Gehry, Maira Kalman & Oth­ers Explain its Essen­tial Role

How Zaha Hadid Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture & Drew Inspi­ra­tion from Russ­ian Avant-Garde Art

Take an Online Course on Design & Archi­tec­ture with Frank Gehry

Frank Lloyd Wright Thought About Mak­ing the Guggen­heim Muse­um Pink

Based in Seoul, Col­inMarshall writes and broad­cas**ts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities* and the book *The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.