The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Architecture of Frank Gehry
Presented by Siân Walters
14th October 2025

Synopsis

Bilbao is now the Basque Country's most important city thanks in no small part to the impact of the Guggenheim Museum, completed in 1997 to huge critical and popular acclaim and described by the celebrated late architect Philip Johnson as "the greatest building of our time”. This extraordinary edifice, the first to use Frank Gehry’s trademark titanium panels, combines modernity and beauty with practicality and function, and also a great sense of fun which makes it a joy to explore. 

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Our lecture begins with an introduction to the Guggenheim Foundation and how it came about, and then moves on to describe the very particular circumstances that led to the commission in Bilbao. It examines the career of Frank Gehry using illustrations from his work in Europe and America, and describes how the vast asymmetrical, titanium-clad structure in Bilbao was created using the latest technology, initially developed in the aerospace and shipbuilding industries.

 

The lecture ends with an introduction to the collection of paintings, sculptures and installations contained within the museum, covering the permanent collection as well as providing up-to-date information on current and future exhibitions. Gehry’s recent projects such as his involvement with the Battersea Power Station development are also discussed.

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Profile

Siân Walters is an art historian and the director of Art History in Focus. She has been a lecturer at the National Gallery for over 20 years and taught their first online course, Stories of Art, in September 2020. She also lectures for The Wallace Collection, The Art Fund and many art societies and colleges throughout Europe, and taught at Surrey University for many years. 

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Her specialist areas include 15th and 16th century Italian Art, Spanish Art and Architecture, Dutch and Flemish painting and the relationship between Dance and Art (she is an honorary advisor to the Nonsuch Historical Dance Society). Siân studied at Cambridge University where she was awarded a choral exhibition and a 1st for her dissertation on the paintings of Arnold Schoenberg. She has lived in France and Italy where she worked for the eminent Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon and for the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. She spends much of the year organising and leading specialist art tours abroad, including bespoke trips for The Arts Society.

 

In recent years Siân has been asked to represent the National Gallery at the International Hay Festival, and was named a Highly Commended finalist in the World’s Best Guide Awards. In 2018 she was invited to be the guest lecturer on the inaugural BRAVO Cruise of Performing Arts alongside Katherine Jenkins, Julian Lloyd Webber and Ruthie Henshall. In 2020 Siân presented the first online courses for both The Wallace Collection and The National Gallery, and was one of the first accredited lecturers to provide online Zoom lectures.

 

In 2020 she created a programme of online tours called Cultural Travels from Home, with live visits by special arrangement, broadcast from a number of major European art galleries allowing virtual access to their collections and exhibitions, from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice to the Castello Storzesco in Milan. The programme has included the world’s first ever livestream tours of the Basilica of San Marco and Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, the Medici Palace in Florence, the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, the Brera Art Gallery and Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Palazzo Baldeschi in Perugia, the Palazzo Colonna and Palazzo Farnese (French Embassy) in Rome, the National Gallery of Slovenia and many more. These collaborations continue to raise important funds for the galleries and cultural sites as well as those working in the cultural sector. These are being offered to Arts Society groups as part of their online tours/events programme, please get in touch for more details.