n Frank’s design, which although it was probably the one which made everybody more nervous about how can you build that, it was fairly clear that it was the one who had understood and reflected better the different goals for the building.
The panel had reason to be nervous. Frank Garry had built a reputation for innovative, eye-catching designs, but his latest venture, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Commissioned in 1987, by 1991, the project was entering a long hiatus as engineers struggled to work out how to build it, and funding and planning issues stopped any significant progress.
With an even more audacious design for the Guggenheim Bilbo Bio, serious questions are being asked about whether it was even possible. There was a lot of skepticism and there was a lot of criticism also from even from the architectural uh world saying, well, this building cannot be built or cannot be built on time, cannot be built on budget.
But this project would be different. To pull off his most daring design yet, Gary had an ace up his sleeve. But before he could use it, his team first had to transform his early sketches into something more tangible. Starting with his trademark process of model building. Now, using those initial sketches as a foundation, Gary’s design team began experimenting with models made from paper and card, developing the building’s distinctive form through physical manipulation.
There’s initial conceptual sketches. They’re descriptive gestures of what the building is trying to capture to then physical models that are initially just you know like small like ch almost like children’s building blocks. From these the team would develop hundreds of models increasing in complexity as they balanced creative flare with the practical requirements of the building.
you were working with the form both from a expressive gesture but then also dealing with some of the work that was happening with the consultants and what their requirements were, how you were meeting floor area requirements or did you have enough room for the bathrooms that were needed in that area. Now, designing something this complicated with pieces of card is one thing, but building it is a heck of a lot more difficult.
And to explain why, I’m going to need some crisps. For thousands of years, architecture and engineering has run on a set of rules. Buildings were based around flat shapes or planes like squares, rectangles, and triangles. Within those, certain things will always be true. Two parallel lines will never meet. A straight line can always be drawn between two points.
And right angles are always 90°. That’s what’s known as Ukidian geometry. It’s named after a guy called Uklid who first wrote about it. It’s a big one. You can see this in everything from the pyramids to skyscrapers like the Empire State Building. But the Guggenheim build bow isn’t based on flat surfaces. Just take a look at this wall here.
Look how it curves out, then back up on itself, then twists around the higher it goes. If we draw a line from here to here, rather than being straight, it ends up looking like this. And if we drew a triangle on it, the angles wouldn’t add up to 180°. Shapes like this fall into a category known as non uklidian geometry.
So ukidian, non- uklitian, why does any of that matter? Well, this right here is a crisp. Or to our American viewers, it’s a chip. Now, this is actually a really good example of ukidian geometry because it’s round, flat, square. No surprises. Now, if you were an engineer and I asked you to build this for me, it would be pretty straightforward.
I could draw it from this angle and from this angle and you’d have a pretty good idea about what I was after. Now imagine I’ve asked you to build me a Pringle, which would be a pretty strange request, but basically I could show you it like this and it would look flat. But turn it this way and you realize it’s curved not just in one direction, but in two.
I can’t accurately draw this in two dimensions because it doesn’t follow any of the rules that allow me to do that. I could give you the gist of it, but that’s not really good enough. Engineers need precise measurements to be able to carry out their work. To really show you how to build this, I would need an advanced piece of software.
Enter Katilla. Katilla is a 3D modeling software first developed to help design the French Mirage. But in the early 1990s, it was making a name for itself in the design of the new Boeing 7. Touted as the world’s first paperless airplane. Computer design packages were beginning to make inroads into architect studios.
But what Kier offered was revolutionary because it was based on mathematical equations rather than polygons. It allowed the team to model complex 3D shapes and from that model provide accurate cross-sections and plans to engineers. So at the time the prevalent way of working was CAD, AutoCAD, Graphosoft.
You could do limited stuff in 3D, but it was predominantly a replacement for 2D pinbar manual drafting, right? The complex geometries being developed by Gary’s design team were still novel in the world of architecture. But this was all basic stuff for aerospace software, which could not only model the complex geometries, but also split them up into components which had precise details about them.
the idea that there was a maybe an overall shape to the airplane or car and then pieces would be fit into that and then those pieces would be distributed from manufacturing. The whole thing would come together virtually. You would test the plane and then you’d build it and it and it would work, right? But the first time Gary used the software, it was to design something more used to swimming than flying.
Well, yes, that was pretty innovative at the time and we’d already had some early successes using the KIA technology um through like our Barcelona project which was built in 1992. Gary had been commissioned to design a sculpture for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. What he designed was this, the Pesh or fish.
Now granted, it doesn’t look super complicated, but just like the Pringle, it’s based on a series of huge curves that are almost impossible to describe on paper. So for a solution, his team turned to Katilla. Um we were doing it through traditional drawings and it just wasn’t working out and we we found some support um outside the office that had aerospace and aeronautic background.
This strange new software had proved its worth and was seen as the key to unlocking the daring design of the Guggenheim. Now, for any Gen Z’s out there thinking, “Well, so what?” It’s worth remembering just how basic digital tech was back then. At this point in the early ’90s, most people had never used the internet.
Miniisks were the latest way to listen to music, and cutting edge computer game graphics looked like this. And this sounds crazy, but the ability to do real time rotation of shaded models, you really didn’t see it anywhere before. I mean, you would work in wireframe and then there would be this process where you’d render and you’d see over the course of a half hour that image taking place, you know, and just to see somebody being able to like look at a a complex shape from all its sides and understand it was, you know, it’s not just about the real time, it’s
it’s interactive, right? So the interaction with real-time geometry for me was revolutionary. Now as groundbreaking as this technology was in the ’90s, don’t think the innovation stopped there because Katilla has come a very long way since the days of Guggenheim. Take a look at this for example.
It’s called the Henderson in Hong Kong and as you can see it’s absolutely epic. It was also built using KIA on the 3D experience platform and really pushed the limits of design and fabrication. The entire skyscraper is covered in more than 4,000 individually shaped panels. 3D Experience models each one and even simulates how they’ll be manufactured.
Now, when I was first starting out the industry, I honestly would have thought that something like this would have been impossible because everything is so complex and interconnected. You change one thing and everything else gets affected and has to change with it. But 3D experience is a real gamecher because it updates everything.
You make a change to the facade and it updates not just that but also the structural layout, the internal floor plates, all of it in real time. And perhaps most importantly, every piece of information is managed on the same platform. Trust me, on a project this big and this complicated with so many people involved, miscommunication happens a lot.
So having one model, one kind of like common source of truth that architects, engineers, manufacturers can all refer to is a real lifesaver. You can find out more about how Kier can help take your project to the next level at the link down there in the video description. It massively helps us out when you guys go and check out our video sponsors and enables us to keep making great content for you.
So, if it’s relevant, please do go and check out Kir at the link below. With that, it’s time to head back to the 1990s. In 1993, just 2 years after winning the competition, construction began. And this is where things got really tricky. Kier played a critical role, but it didn’t have all the answers. It was able to accurately describe what had to be built, but then it was over to the engineers to work out how to actually construct it.
What is katya poras? A group of surfaces and volumes. And this is perfectly designed but nothing at all defined in one sentence. Not ready to build. While Katilla was great at defining the overall shape of the museum, a lot of work still had to go into how it would be manufactured. You have a cut, you have a line, a line of perfectly designed one.
The shape of different areas that shape is titanium is stone board is glass. But in order to place these materials on the structure, you have to develop the engineering and you have to manufacture this structure, these tubes or steel uh profiles in our of circumferences in order to construct this and then to put the surface to put the the cladding on the the titanium and gypsum of the stone or whatever.
The job of developing the structural design went to S Soom in Chicago, who took Gary’s plans and developed an intricate steel mesh that would provide a strong frame that could accommodate the building’s expressive curves, but crucially also create a large open interior free of columns. The primary structure was so complex and interlin that large parts were unable to freestand and were held in place by cranes until it was complete.
The design was so intricate that no two steel beams in the entire 3,000 ton structure were the same, but also none of them were curved. To achieve the facade effect of a single or sometimes double curve, more steel structures were built on top. [Applause] A secondary frame of curved horizontal beams provided shape along one axis and a third tertiary structure composed of curved vertical beams provided the definition for the other.
Here is the wall we looked at earlier. Look at how the different structures create arcs and curves that a curved surface can be placed on. They are curves. They are arcs of circumferences in general depending on the area or depending on the soul. Okay, they could be stretched as well, but in general because of the the shape the museum, they don’t have almost known stretch lines.
They are all curves in one length or in two lengths depending on the area. But all the profiles, the beams, they are all the primary structure they were straight. The the massive structure was straight. But the secondary and tertiary, they were curves, arcs of circumferences. Once the structure was complete, work moved on to enclose it.
Stainless steel panels were installed to enclose the structure, followed by a waterproof membrane. The Guggenheim Bilbao isn’t just about wavy curves. What really strikes you is the warmth with which it reflects the light in a soft, pillowy texture. Bilbao is a city that’s often cloudy and yet the museum still reflects this with its unique sense of warmth and sympathy.
But the story of how it took on that character is a series of chance events beginning 3,500 km away. I must break you. This is a Soviet Alphacass submarine developed in the 1960s. It was one of the fastest military submarines ever built, thanks to its innovative engine and the revolutionary use of titanium for its hull. But there was a problem.
They were also incredibly expensive to operate. In 1990, as the USSR began to disintegrate, and in an effort to save money, the Soviet Navy began decommissioning the Alphas. This was actually the first of two chance events that decided the outcome of the Guggenheim. The other came sometime later on an uncharacteristically overcast day in Los Angeles.
Gary’s team had been struggling to choose a material to clad the building in. He’d previously used a lead copper alloy, but this had fallen out of favor because of its environmental impact. Gary was unhappy with early tests using stainless steel, which didn’t capture the city’s distinctive light in an attractive way. On that fateful cloudy day in LA, Gary’s eye was caught by a piece of titanium cladding on the exterior of his studio.
He was impressed with how it reflected the gray sky, which perfectly matched the typical weather in Belauo. But there was a hitch. Titanium is expensive. It was more commonly used for making components for airplanes than for cladding buildings. I must break you. But as the Alphaclass submarines are broken down, the titanium from their hulls enter the global market, driving the price down and giving Gary an opportunity to give the museum its distinctive finish.
You know, it’s a very thin 24 gauge metal. Thinness of the panel gives it a little bit of we call it oil canning where it kind of puffs a little bit which gives it its unique kind of textural quality when you look at the pictures and and how it captures the light. There’s a goldenness to it that’s different from stainless steel.
It’s like a yellow glow to the [Music] metal. 33,000 panels were rolled to a thickness of just 0.38 mm. With each one measuring just 80 by 115 cm, they were perfectly suited to define the final shape of the building. It was a happy accident that we chose to have a very small panel. It naturally could bend easily over the shapes that we had which were very gentle curves.
When you take the largestness of the building, it it looks like a lot of curves. But when you get down to it, you know, you can take a posted stamp, lay it over a basketball, for instance. If you get a small enough stamp, you know, you can cover the whole basketball with stamps.
While the panels may have been small enough to cover the bold swooping curves of the facade, physically getting them into place was a whole other challenge, the solution came not from the pages of a construction handbook, but from the mountains that surrounded the city. Rock climbers. Not only the height, there are areas that with cranes, platform, scissors you don’t reach.
The people must climb and then to go down the step. Now when they have to clean the facad, they have to use escalators. They have to the climbers. You have to to to use climbers. As this extraordinary building rose along the banks of the Nevon, so too did the city’s admiration, transforming skepticism into war in the heart of this old steel town.
I will say the first year, everybody was shocked. This isn’t a stupid thing. This is sure. But the point is that little by little the building, the construction, the structure was connected with people. Little by little people were falling in love with the project and began to believe. [Music] On the 18th of October 1997, 4 years after construction began, the Guggenheim Museum Bil Bao opened.
And as the eyes of the world fixed their gaze on this extraordinary structure, signs began to emerge that the gamble had paid off. [Music] I remember when the museum opened that it was headline news at the CNN news program which at that time was the only global news source and that was a bit of a surprise for us because we thought how is this happening that an opening of the museum in a small city in north of Spain is is becoming headline news at CNN.
[Music] The building instantly captured the imagination of everyone from locals to international spies. The museum had planned for around 400,000 visitors, but in its first full year of operation, it welcomed over 1.3 million. In our initial plans, we thought we would need 8 10 years of good uh operation to really capture the interest and imagination of the words.
But the fact that it was new since the very beginning, it meant that the the museum was already in the imagination not just of people living close to to us but far away. No, innovative, transgressive and creative. We came all the way over here from Vancouver, Canada just to see the museum.
For me, the museum is beautiful, aspirational, and inspiring. As the museum thrived, so too did Bil Bao. The plan to reinvent the city was bearing fruit. The Metro had opened 2 years before, and the Campo Volatin foot bridge followed suit shortly after, improving pedestrian access along the river on which the museum sits. In 2000, the new airport terminal opened, giving a further boost to visitors from around the world and transforming Bil Bao from a downcast regional city to a thriving global destination.
Bilbao is once again a major prosperous city. Its streets are teameming with locals and visitors enjoying everything this place has to offer. Last year, for example, it’s estimated that it was over€800 million of additional economic activity because of the operation of the museum. What I feel when I go back to the bow and I see great great success when I see the the change of the city when I see the the 1 million people going to visit Guggenheim the vitality the the the lively restaurants people tourists the changes has been huge. The Guggenheim
was such a wild success that it kickstarted a wave of museum construction around the world. In 2000, the tape modern opened, revitalizing London’s decrepit South Bank. And in 2010, a new Pompadoo Center transformed the French city of Mets. But the list really is endless. In fact, the chances are there’s probably somewhere near you which has tried to follow the template of using a major art or cultural center to transform the fortunes of a town or city.
Its impacts even shaped the construction industry, kicking off a revolution in design and technology that still defines it today. The role of of technology and and information was the kind of the silver bullet that allowed these very ambitious designers to do unprecedented, you know, buildings and to have the confidence that they could take that authority and that risk.
Gary’s outlandish design didn’t just pioneer the use of digital software in architecture. It fundamentally changed the relationship between the architect and the engineer. Architects are supposed to not get involved in uh affecting how things are built. They’re just supposed to say when they’re built, this is what they look like.
But these new geometries um these new methodologies that line between what is intent and what is the means of delivering it starts eroding. The complexity of the design puts a much heavier emphasis on the role of the architect’s model. In a more traditional workflow, an architect develops a series of plans.
An engineer then takes those and creates their own set of drawings and then finally it all gets passed on down to the contractors. and so on. But the complexity of these non- uklidian designs places more emphasis on the importance of the architect’s model which in turn adds more responsibility to the architects to make sure that coordination between all the different disciplines happens as effectively and clearly as possible.
So the idea that the architect’s model would become the basis that everybody does their work off of was revolutionary and also frankly risky because you can imagine a curved shape like Bill Bao. If I say, “Well, the surface is here and your structure is going to be here.” You know, I mean, you’re setting off a chain of of decisions that if there’s an issue, they could just everybody can just point back to that original shape and say, “Well, that must have been the source of the problem.
” It may have been risky, but for Gary, it worked. Along with his highly collaborative approach, this greater level of involvement is what helped this extraordinary building complete on time and on budget. In 2002, Gary Technologies was established, a service firm which was hugely influential in the widespread adoption of 3D modeling and BIM software throughout the architectural profession.
It would go on to enable countless iconic buildings like the Birds Nest Stadium in Beijing and the Louv Abu Dhabi. For Gary’s practice, meanwhile, his reputation as an architectural heavyweight was confirmed, and it provided an opportunity to correct the record of a building that had once threatened to tarnish his legacy.
The world Disney concert hall in San was in that moment had been delayed or stopped for 10 years, I don’t know, and they were unable to push the the project. And I remember that Gary sent to Dilva the one of the contractor of the main contractor of the concept to talk with us to see what we had we we what we were doing in order to to be able to construct in order to be able to to keep to the patch.
After Bill Bao, when Disney got resurrected, Frank said, “We will only do this if we are the architect of record and we will only do this if this process is adopted.” The Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in 2003, 16 years after it was commissioned. It was widely held as a masterpiece and remains an iconic landmark in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, back in Bil Bao, the Guggenheim still stands as an iconic destination in the city. It’s a timeless structure that still amazes visitors to this day. Bill. Bill. Bill Ba. Bill. Frank Gary, you’re a genius. Behold the new Springfield Concert Hall. 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, all those innovations like ripples in a pond have to start somewhere. And in this case, that single point is the Guggenheim build bow. [Music] This video was sponsored by Katilla. You can learn more about them at the link below.
It massively helps us out when you guys go and check out our video sponsors and enables us to keep making great content. So, if it’s relevant, please do go and check out Katilla. We would really, really appreciate it. And as always guys, if you enjoyed this video and you want to enable me to eat more crisps on camera, make sure you subscribe to the B&M [Music] Okay, stop.
