Hello and welcome to Bloomberg’s weekly design digest. I’m Kriston Capps, staff writer and editor for Bloomberg CityLab and your guide to the world of architecture and the people who build things.

This week the Obama Foundation announced that Theaster Gates will design a frieze for the Obama Presidential Center, while President Donald Trump put his name on the side of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday.

When the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened its doors in 1997, it triggered a wave of hype, investment and speculation unlike anything the art world had seen before or since.

The titanium fronds of Frank Gehry’s museum building helped put the city in Spain’s Basque Country on the map. Over its first 5 years the Guggenheim welcomed some 5 million visitors and drew hundreds of millions of euros in taxes. Gehry became a household name. For Bilbao, the gains were permanent. The city’s mayor has said that the museum has added €500 million to local GDP annually, in part by the creation of some 6,000 jobs. (Beatriz Plaza, an economist at the University of the Basque Country, puts the number at 1,200 permanent jobs.)

Its success was hardly guaranteed. Days before the museum opened, local law enforcement foiled an attack on the museum by the (now disbanded) Basque separatist terrorist group ETA; flowers marked the spot where a police officer died in the attack. In 2022, upon the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Bilbao (the metonym by which the building is still known today), former Basque bursar Juan Luis Laskurain told the Financial Times that “there was more opposition than support.”

The public’s reception erased any doubts, not just for locals or the Basque region or even Spain but seemingly the whole globe. Modern art museums and their host cities across the US and Europe raced to replicate the Gugg’s success by franchising art collections and hiring top designers — including Gehry.

The numbers paint a striking picture. According to Joanna Woronkowicz, a cultural economist at Indiana University Bloomington and the lead author of the study “Building Better Arts Facilities,” some 725 new museum buildings were erected between 1994 and 2008, at a cost of more than $15 billion. Not even the global financial crisis slowed down the Bilbao wave: In 2016, Julian Halperin reported in The Art Newspaper that museums put another $5 billion toward new facilities between 2007 and 2014.

So many factors contributed to the Bilbao’s success that it’s hard to identify just one. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano and famed for its sharp contrast with the medieval backdrop of Le Marais, is no less striking a juxtaposition than Gehry’s heavy metal artichoke against a neglected industrial district along the Nervión River. But the Pompidou arrived in 1977 — too early to be swept up by the emerging digital media environment that gasped when Bilbao opened.

Meanwhile Gehry’s design was the first major architectural project completed with a computer-aided design program known as CATIA. And the franchise model struck by Laskurain really was unique: Basque authorities paid $20.9 million to exhibit works from the Guggenheim museum collection for 20 years, earning an average of 1 million visitors a year.

But the Bilbao Effect never paid off as much for other cities and museums — and in many cases, it cost them dearly. Of some 700 cultural institutions that built expansions or new facilities between 1994 and 2008, some 80% of those ran over cost, according to Woronkowicz’s study. Some of those cost projections doubled.

Many museums from the franchise area are still flourishing, the Tate Liverpool, Louvre Lens and Pompidou Metz among them. But the global recession hit other expansions hard; several never took off or failed entirely.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art was one institution that crashed after trying to match Bilbao’s success. The encyclopedic museum in Washington, DC, hoped to add a contemporary wing by Gehry to its Beaux Arts museum building, located just two blocks east of the White House (talk about a jarring sight). Many of the museum’s backers came from AOL, however, and after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the expansion plan fell through. By 2014, after a long court battle, the museum was dissolved by its trustees.

Gehry emerged as a popular villain in stories about Bilbao fizzle. Which of course never made any sense: The man didn’t hire himself. When museum leaders got over their skis, it was usually because in their enthusiasm they neglected the most important factor in Bilbao’s success: a rock-solid foundation with regional and local support.

In fact, Bilbao’s turnaround was engineered by an entity known as Bilbao Ria 2000, a publicly owned corporation whose board comprised representatives of all the various government entities with a stake in the future of downtown.

“Public entities from different government levels, political affiliations, and diverse interests coordinated their activities and agreed on the projects that rescued Bilbao from a deep crisis to make it a flourishing, award-winning machine,” write researchers Fernando Monge, Jorrit de Jong and Linda Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School in a 2020 paper.

The boring truth is that the transition from an industrial economy to a services-oriented one is difficult and Bilbao — the city — worked for a decade in the 1990s to set the circumstances to make Bilbao — the building — happen. Lightning strikes from the ground up.

Design stories we’re writing

Not content with its bid to absorb Warner Bros., Netflix is coming for the shopping mall next. The ubiquitous streaming company is opening three permanent brick-and-mortar spaces across the US. Two of them are now live — a Netflix House opened in the King of Prussia Mall just outside Philadelphia in November and another one opened at the Galleria Dallas this month — while a third one is destined for Las Vegas. Sarah Holder visited a Netflix House and spoke to architect Melissa Gonzalez of Seattle-based firm MG2 about executing the streamer’s vision for turning former department stores into brand-activation spaces. Read Holder on the full circle that Netflix has taken from channeling shopping mall nostalgia in Stranger Things to inhabiting shopping malls themselves.

The Trump administration will shutter the National Center for Atmospheric Research, an important hub for climate science for studying climate change. From its base at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, the center has developed crucial systems for modeling global climate change, which President Donald Trump has described as a “hoax.” In advancing an attack against climate science, as my colleagues Zahra Hirji, Eric Roston and Will Wade report, the Trump administration is also undermining a striking government site. Designed by I.M. Pei and landscape architect Dan Kiley, the Mesa Laboratory is an example of science and philosophy embedded in a civic structure. The abstract building and sensitive landscape are modeled after the landforms of Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. The design serves as a reminder to the scientists and public alike that the project is to protect the great beauty of this world, and that work truly matters.

Design stories we’re reading

Catherine Slessor writes about architect and “king of Central Park West” Robert Stern, who channeled 1920s splendor into projects that still felt contemporary. (The Guardian)

Carolina A. Miranda delivers an appreciation on Gehry that focuses on the “unmistakable SoCal informality” of his early projects. (The Atlantic)

Daniel Jonas Roche shares new details (and renderings) for the design by Francis Kéré and SOM for the Las Vegas Museum of Art. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

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