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Basque Center
BASQUE STUDIES
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Online Course C460 ·
Bilbao Guggenheim Museum
Lesson one
Postindustrial Bilbao
Old city in a global world
Required Reading
Eduardo J. Glass, “Historical Background”
(Chapter 1, Bilbao’s Modern Business Elite,
Univ. of Nevada Press, Reno, 1997.)
Frederick Buell, “The Three Worlds” (Chapter 1,
National Culture and the New Global System, The Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore,
1994.)
Learning Goals
1. Situate Bilbao geographically and
historically.
2. Introduce the global view of economic and
cultural history
3. Raise initial questions as to the dilemmas,
complexities, challenges, and opportunities presented by a
globalized world to traditional cultures and postindustrial
economies.
4. Recognize the necessities of urban and
economic renewal within this newly globalized
world.
First it was the “Medieval Villa” (founded
the year 1300 by Don Diego López de Haro), then it
was the “Commercial Villa” (after the
establishment of its Consulate in 1511), then, since the
second half of the last century, it was the proud regional
“industrial city” we all know. But a new millenium
is dawning, and now, since the middle ’90s, a new
“postindustrial Bilbao” is being reborn from the
ashes of its industrial ruins.
A massive infrastructural transformation and urban
regeneration process is under way to turn Bilbao into a
service-oriented and culturally attractive city. The
flagship of the entire redevelopment, Frank Gehry’s
spectacular Guggenheim-Bilbao Museoa, has made international
news, but the goal is to effect the postindustrial
reinvention of the city. As it undergoes the painful yet
exhilarating metamorphosis from industrial ruination to
architectural rebirth, Bilbao presents singular
opportunities for tourism-based industries, as well as
unique challenges for students of Basque society and
culture.
Miguel de Unamuno wrote of his Bilbao, nursed by the
Nervion River …
You are, Nervión, the history of the
Villa,
you her past and her future, you are
memory always turning into hope
and on your firm riverbed
a fleeing flow.
The foundational charter granted the medieval Villa
exclusive jurisdictional rights to the Nervión trade.
The river has been Bilbao’s history, wealth, and
metaphor. Bilbao was the natural port for exports and a wide
window on the world.
Bilbao was doubly blessed with a seaport and vast
mineral wealth. Never has this been as clear as during the
last 150 years of industrial boom, during which the
River’s left bank held Spain’s largest iron and
steel industries.
A wasteland of industrial ruins is almost all that is
left now of that fabled industrial period, but the ongoing
massive redevelopment is testament that the generous, dark
River is still very much alive. As Bilbao emerges from the
mantle of debris accumulated during the last tide of
history, the city of 360,000 people has never been as remote
from, and yet as close to that small town of 18,000 souls
that she was only 150 years ago. Seventy-five thousand
people have abandoned the city during the last two decades
of decline, but Bilbao is far from having given up her
tradition of international business. Her capacity for
high-stakes risk-taking remains undiminished. And don’t
forget the metaphor about which Bertolt Brecht wrote,
“How beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful is the
moon of Bilbao, the most beautiful city of the
continent.” Hers is also the aesthetics of the
“tough city” that has seduced artists such as
Richard Serra and Frank Gehry. This seduction is perhaps
Bilbao’s greatest asset at this moment; it is the true
arena in which, by architectural spectacle and the sheer
will to challenge all odds, she is transforming herself in
ways almost unimaginable a few years ago.
Just look what is happening in Abando-ibarra, right
across from the University of Deusto, a grand
titanium-skinned white whale has run aground there. Or is it
a pirate’s old galleon suddenly resurfaced? It is
Gehry’s masterpiece. It is the now undisputed emblem of
a reinvigorated city unwilling to fade away with the demise
of its blast furnaces. The Altos Hornos de Vizcaya, famed
industrial engine, and fiery symbol of the region’s
economy until just yesterday. The volcano of the left bank
is now mostly extinguished but the sunset’s yellow
colors are captured and reflected on the titanium scales of
Gehry’s pallid cetacean. “A miracle!”
proclaimed The New York Times, in contemplation of the
radiant building. The real miracle, of course, is the
resolve of the Bilbainos to not tolerate the extinction of
their city’s proverbial fire and
flourish.
Ashen debris, white smoke, black water, red slag - a
generous supply of dirt of all colors and elements was
Bilbao’s emblem. Her distinctive aesthetic force
consisted in turning ugliness into a badge of honor, a thing
of beauty for those willing to contemplate with eyes
uncontaminated by pastoral nostalgia. But now the smoking
chimneys are gone, even dirt is in shorter supply, and the
tourists have started to come. The decades of heavy
industrial exploitation had turned the Nervión into a
black meandering sewer upon which the Bilbainos had long
since learned to turn their backs. No longer do they need to
avert their eyes from the prodigious River, the very soul of
their history and identity. On the contrary, Bilbao is going
to transform its riverfront into the real center of the new
city. An ambitious $1.5 billion urban renewal plan is being
implemented, focusing upon the expansion of the port and
airport, creation of a subway, and planning for a transport
hub. A new development on the riverfront, called
Abandoibarra, will include the spectacular Guggenheim Museum
as well as a conference and concert hall,
Euskalduna.
Two of these major projects are emblematic of the new
Bilbao: Foster’s sleek costly subway, which, besides
its practical advantages, symbolizes the city’s new
modernity; and Gehry’s voluptuous and optimistic
Guggenheim Museum. The museum has over-shadowed all other
projects by drawing the international attention that Bilbao
desperately desires.
This is as great an historical transformation as one
could expect from Bilbao’s fin de millennium. It
signals the city’s willingness to unburden herself from
all the sins of the industrial revolution and the ensuing
environmental degradation with the hegemony of mining and
iron industries dismantled, the sky free from the drifting
clouds pumped into it by the now sorely missed smoking
chimneys, it is not longer taboo to look at the
river.
The Nervion was first bridged long before the Villa
was founded in 1300. That bridge of San Antón was the
first Promethean attempt to arch worlds apart: land and
shore, river and sea, interior and exterior, past and
future, left and right. It is only through a tradition of
bridging the seemingly impossible - with suspension bridges
floating in air and drawbridges opening up their mandibles
to the sky in a big yawn as the surreptitious cargo files
by, structures that were always tenuous and temporary rites
of passage, always complicated works are arrogant
engineering - that Bilbao has sustained the fiction of a
synthesis of warring elements, a historical linkage between
the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of the Villa and its
hinterland, of the rural and urban economies, of
aristocratic and proletarian lives, of Basque and European
interest.
After Deusto there were no bridges. Fifteen
kilometers on right and left riverbanks from the city to the
sea were uncompromised by any link, with the single
exception of the suspension bridge in Portugalete. But times
are changing and the river has been criss-crossed by several
new bridges (Rontegi, Euskalduna, Zubizuri) and others are
in the planning stages. The secret, as everyone knows, it
that the one bridge that will really matter must connect
Bilbao with entities that are far more virtual (so-called
Global Culture) and far more concrete (Wall Street) that
anything achieved so far. The Basque president’s visit
to Wall Street to deliver a $20 million check for the
Guggenheim Museum franchise is a statement that leaves few
doubts in this regard.
Bridging the interior’s “tierra llana”
with the port-centered, open Villa was not a small feat
(although this, too, dressed up in nativism and
provincialism, still continues to be a source of friction).
Now, however, the only measure of success is the bridging of
transatlantic distances - New York at one end and Bilbao at
the other - facilitating traffic in modern art and museum
franchises. The Romanesque arches of the San Antón
bridge, medieval symbol of a proud Bilbao, are now
complemented by the postindustrial city establishing herself
as the key port and fundamental artistic point de
repère of the so-called “Atlantic Arch”
stretching between Santiago de Compostela and Bourdeaux.
Welcome to the newly imagined global postmodern space of
late capitalism.
But there is a lot of bridging to be done at home as
well between the two riverbanks, two languages, and two
millennia. Issues of violence, nationality, class, gender,
and language continue to polarize Bilbao society
endemically. She appears uneasily perched between a
mythology of the past, which successfully deployed an
ethnographic identity of pre-modern Basque enigmatic
uniqueness, and a mythology of the future which looks to
global markets and the delirious glamour of New York for the
inspiration of a new post-ethnic
identity.
The discourse of urban regeneration works
particularly well in fostering a sense of new direction. It
embraces economic as well as environmental, cultural,
social, and symbolic components. Leisure activities and
so-called “cultural industries” become most
relevant in regenerating urban centers. The distinction
between “art,” “communication,”
“culture,” and “entertainment”
disappears. Urban regeneration by leisure and cultural
industries has been attempted with uneven results in various
European and American cities. Not only yuppy tourists, the
discourse reassures, but also Bilbao’s unemployed,
youth, migrant, and marginal people will benefit from such
cultural industries. The argument is that emblematic
architecture is the condition for the economic renewal that
will bring jobs and prestige back to the
city.
In the beginning was architecture - arché or
foundation. In classical aesthetic theory architecture is
the first art. Salvation by architecture is the cornerstone
of the new regenerationist ideology in Bilbao. Due to its
dependence on public funds, architecture tends to be used
ideologically more than the other arts. Bilbao provides
perhaps the grandest example of architecture as ideology and
spectacle. The ideological use of architecture consists in
the uncontested assumption that public power must invest
massively in emblematic buildings conceived by star
architects. “Emblems,” that is, of ideas of
progress, culture, class, equality, and
peace.
This is the time to visit and study Bilbao.
Gehry’s masterpiece is an architectural triumph among
the postindustrial ruins of the Nervión. If
architecture provides cause for celebration, this is it. It
has been likened to a whale, a ship, an artichoke, a
mermaid, a waterfall, a flower, a fish, Marilyn Monroe, and
a chopped-up Chinese paper dragon. It has been hailed by the
critics as the building of the late 20th
century.
This is also the time to realize the potential
rewards or turning Bilbao into a privileged topic of
research and writing. Ruination and rebirth, the end of
times and the beginning of times are historical processes
deserving urban and cultural studies. Some of the obvious
discourses deserving attention are:
1. The ruined postindustrial
city turned into the postmodern model of an architecturally
imprinted city.
2. Urban planning and
regeneration
3. Architecture
4. Museum culture
5. Globalization
6. Post-industrialism
7. Migration
8. International art markets
9. Cultural industries
10. Anthropology
11. History.
Written Lesson for Submission
Please write a two to three page essay on one of
the topics below or choose another relevant topic. Again,
the essay should creatively engage with the facts and ideas
presented in the written materials and should not consist of
merely repeating the information offered by the instructor
and the readings.
1. Describe some of the basic dilemmas faced by
traditional cultures when confronted with the new wave of
globalization.
2. What is your view of the tensions between
“universal civilization” and “national
cultures?”
3. Is Bilbao’s pre-modern history a closed
economic unit or cultural independent configuration in any
sense? Or is it, rather, a global construction?
4. To the degree that Bilbao has been at the forefront
of Basque commerce, industry and urban life, what are the
implications of such global reach for “Basque
culture” in general?
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