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Evans’ Rag

Vol 6 Issue 7

With this month’s article, I’ve wrung out highlights of last year’s trip to Spain. Madrid’s Prada Museum alone is left to cover. Not that we covered the entire country in two weeks, barely skimming highlights.

Gaudi in Barcelona has been a dream of mine since college days, and the Alhambra since I studied it after grad school, doing research for renovating the Miami Biltmore Hotel.

Frank Gehry, that East Coast transplant to LA, reached the height of his career at Bilbao, so people say, though I believe his Disney Concert Hall in LA is the better urban sculpture. His work is unique—not always in the best sense of the word.

The museum assemblage in Bilbao must be something of a surprise to tourists from around Europe and the world. That tourists would even travel to the once-grim industrial city is something of a surprise.

The Pompidou Centre, surrounded by 18th century Paris, might be a competitor for wildest modern act when it was built in the 1970’s. By comparison, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, folding in on itself, shiny and alive even under a gray sky, isn’t as extreme in contrast to the industrial city in Spain it now inhabits.

I read the Pompidou Centre is slated for a major rehabilitation. Paris was scandalized when it was built, though in the sixty odd years since, Parisians have gotten over their fright.

Washington came close to getting its own Frank Gehry—the Cocoran Gallery of Art had been slated to get an addition in the early 2000s, but couldn’t raise the funds to pay for it. There’s no need to comment on the sterile office building that now sits in its place, crowding the Cocoran.  

You can’t make this up—Bilbao and the Cocoran.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Super Gehry!

What to make of the world’s most powerful city and its bland urban environment—the most beautiful parts of DC are its open spaces—and the Jefferson Memorial. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial was simply too abstract for Washington pols, so they had to add the group of bronze soldiers. Oh yeah. Otherwise the tourists wouldn’t get it. Talking down to their constituents is a well established Washington tradition.

So the transplanted Ivy League architect was hired to do up a fancy bit to show the world what old España could dress up like. Sorta like I.M. Pei did for Paris with his storied Louvre pyramid—with less constraint.

I see migrating cultures written all over this story. Like open space is the best part of our existence on this blue rock, even if some folks don’t get it.