By the late 1980s Bilbao was in serious crisis with the collapse of its shipbuilding, steel, and port industries; unemployment approached 30 percent. The Basque autonomous government struck a deal with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York to bring a new contemporary art museum to the city. Frank Gehry won the design competition; the building rose between 1991 and 1997 on former port land along the river Nervión.

Gehry developed the form using CATIA, an aerospace design software — an application of that tool unprecedented in architecture. It allowed an asymmetrical, non-orthogonal, almost purely sculptural building to be designed, costed, and built. The exterior is clad in 33,000 panels of titanium 0.38 mm thick; titanium is light, doesn't corrode, and carries a constantly shifting sheen — it absorbs and returns the colour of the light running across it through the day.

The interior refuses convention to the same degree. Some galleries are rectangular (for classical hanging of paintings), some are fish-shaped, one is 130 metres long (sized specifically to hold Richard Serra's installation *The Matter of Time*). From outside, the building looks like a sculpture; from inside, like a labyrinth.

The museum's economic effect has come to be known as the 'Bilbao effect': in the first three years of opening it drew around four million visitors and contributed more than 500 million euros to the local economy. This launched, around the world, the idea that 'a signature building by a starchitect can save a city' — a notion repeatedly imitated and, more often than not, unsuccessful. Bilbao Guggenheim remains the exception that still works: thirty years on, the titanium skin looks almost no different from the day it opened.