Once a decaying industrial city, Bilbao took on new verve with this stunning composition for a Guggenheim Museum on a former derelict industrial site. Gehry’s creation drew 1.3 million visitors to northern Spain in its first year. It also spawned countless imitators worldwide, all of whom sought to emulate its popularity, aptly dubbed the Bilbao effect. Seen in this light, this design achieved immediate cult status and will be remembered as one of the 1990s most influential ad impressive buildings. (more…)

A number of British collectors left their antiquities and works of art to the nation in the mid-18th century, and these items were displayed in a building called Montague House in Bloomsbury. At the beginning of the 19th century, a purpose-built museum was planned to hose these collections together with the library of George IV, which the king had sold to the museum. (more…)

This building, which serves as an exhibition space for the Vitra Furniture Company at its headquarters outside the town of Weil am Rhein in southern Germany, near the Swiss border, was Gehry’s premiere in Europe, a continent where he thereafter created a major body of his most important works. This commission offered Gehry his first opportunity to create a design for the European context and was his first project to be built in Europe. Gehry’s design strategy, which had been perfected and experimented with in his earlier American projects, was honed to perfection for his first European commission. (more…)

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is one of the nation’s best, with collections that include some of the most beloved and recognizable works of art in the Western world. The galleries capture the history of human creativity beginning with objects produced around 6,000 BC and extending to the present day. (more…)

In the 19th century, the German bourgeoisies increasingly believed that every citizen should have the chance of a comprehensive cultural education. Accordingly, Frederick William III of Prussia commissioned architect Karl Fredrick Schinkel to design an art gallery to house his collection in a museum complex on an island in the Spree River in Berlin. (more…)

Britain’s first public art gallery was crated thanks to the will of Sir Francis Bourgeois, who bequeathed his private collection to the public in 1811, together with a request that his friend Sir John Soane design it. The picture gallery opened in 1817. Soane’s design has since become the inspiration for a number of museums and galleries worldwide. (more…)