Renzo Piano's new museum in Spain shuns the 'Bilbao Effect'

2017-06-23T13:41:00-04:00

Almost 20 years since Frank Gehry’s $100m titanium-clad Guggenheim Bilbao opened, another city on Spain’s north coast is getting a major contemporary art centre designed by an internationally acclaimed “starchitect”.

Renzo Piano's first big commission in Spain, The Centro Botín, is opening today. The architect claims that its comparisons with the museum that became a model for culture-driven regeneration schemes worldwide are too simplistic. According the president of the Fundación Botín’s visual arts committee, Vicente Todolí, the center's primary mission is to serve the local community by providing the city with appropriate cultural infrastructure.

The 10,300 sq. m building is covered in thousands of light-diffusing ceramic tiles, prioritizing "luminosity and lightness" and making it almost invisible from the city center. Split into two, the structure houses 2,500 sq. m of galleries and a 300-seat auditorium respectively. (This compares to around 11,000 sq. m of exhibition space across 19 galleries at the Guggenheim Bilbao.) With vast amount of green space around, the museum is raised on four-meter pillars to preserve the views of the waterfront.

Renzo Piano’s Centro Botín arts centre. Photogr...

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Renzo Piano's new museum in Spain shuns the 'Bilbao Effect'