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have developed by crumpling cardboard and arranging it loosely on a site plan, but there is a huge difference between having some crumpled card glued to a board and having a working art gallery built on a site in Spain. A host of technical questions arise, and they must be addressed with sensitivity and skill if the idea is not to be spoiled in the execution. If for example the shapes could not be built, then they would have to be changed, so a way of building them has to be found, which in this case involved making use of a steel frame to form the basic shapes, and then covering it with titanium-coated tiles that could adapt to the curving geometries. It would have been impossible before computers became a routine part of an engineer’s equipment for such a form of building to be seriously considered, because the mathematics involved are so complex. The steel and titanium pieces were cut into shape away from the site, in factory conditions, where the work can be done with much greater precision. That they could be brought on to the site and assembled is little short of miraculous. It is a world away from the studio conditions in which Gehry invents the building form. He once made an armchair by gluing corrugated cardboard into a large block, and then modelling it with a chainsaw.

24. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (1997); architect: Frank Gehry (born 1929). Frank Gehry was born in Canada, first moved to California as a student, and then settled and started an architectural practice there, initially making fairly conventional designs. His experimental work, starting with his own house in Santa Monica, has taken him in the direction of designing buildings that have more in common with the traditions of sculptural form than with architecture. The design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is spectacular and eye-catching, and has helped to draw international attention to a provincial Spanish city, establishing it on the cultural map of the world. The building is constructed with a steel skeleton, clad in titanium tiles, and it seems almost beside the point that it contains gallery spaces for the exhibition of art works. It is the architectural equivalent of a firework.

Frames and blocks

Architects who see their building through to construction must take an interest in the processes of building, and often it is that process of building that finds expression in the finished work. There would be an attempt for example to make bricks do the things that are particularly characteristic of brick, by making walls and arches, while steel would be asked to do the things that are particularly characteristic of steel, such as making grid-like frames. A building with a steel frame will usually need walls and windows in order to make it useful, and it is possible to make the walls cover the steel frame and hide it from view, which can make the building look solid. However an architect can make it a point of principle, as Mies did, to arrange the solid parts of the wall in such a way as to make it apparent that the steel frame is holding the building up, while the walls are just acting as non-structural screens. In becoming absorbed in the expression of such niceties of construction, it is possible to design fine buildings that are admired by other architects, but which look to the uninitiated very much like unexceptional industrial work. Even the Seagram Building, with its commanding reputation and its understated monumentality, has never been promoted as a tourist sight, except among architects. In fact the idea of ‘expression’ here is less straightforward than at first it seems, because the grid of evenly placed verticals and horizontals is not the whole story of the construction. A building also needs cross-bracing in it, to stop the whole structure collapsing sideways in strong winds (and winds are much stronger on the twentieth floor than they are at ground level). Mies did not let these diagonal bracings show, but others have done (for example, Skidmore Owings and Merrill at the John Hancock Tower in Chicago). Also it