Plans for a brand new Guggenheim museum situated at a nature reserve close to the northern Spanish metropolis of Bilbao have been scrapped after the museum’s board of trustees voted towards the controversial initiative. The outpost of the famed Guggenheim Bilbao would have been situated within the coastal Urdaibai biosphere reserve, 25 miles from town, at two websites: the previous Dalia cutlery manufacturing facility in Guernica and the Murueta shipyards.
In response to a press release seen by The Artwork Newspaper, the museum’s board has determined to not go forward. The board is comprised of members from the Basque regional authorities, the provincial council of Biscay, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Basis, the proposed new museum’s three founding our bodies.
“After a two-year reflection interval on the feasibility research in regards to the venture, the board decided at their assembly [16 December] to not proceed with this initiative,” a Guggenheim spokesperson tells The Artwork Newspaper. The press assertion cites “territorial, city planning, and environmental constraints and limitations” as the explanation for the board’s choice.
The venture, steeped in controversy because it was first mooted in 2008, concerned the 2 places Guernica and Murueta and their connecting pathway, the Guggenheim spokesperson says.
“The growth venture of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Urdaibai was conceived as an establishment able to producing interactions and experiences at a number of ranges in profound concord with the pure processes round it; the place the energetic dialogue between the panorama and inventive creation would discover a related, distinctive expression; as a spot to discover the frequent floor between artwork, analysis and ecology,” the spokesperson tells The Artwork Newspaper.
However not everybody agreed with this imaginative and prescient, with environmental organisations akin to Greenpeace, WWF, Ecologists in Motion and Buddies of the Earth calling for the venture to be deserted. An announcement from the marketing campaign group Guggenheim Urdaibai Cease Platform says: “This venture would have brought about critical ecological injury, one thing the scientific neighborhood has been warning about from the outset.”
In October 2024, Greenpeace filed a lawsuit, claiming that the Spanish authorities was “breaking the regulation by lowering the safety of the general public maritime-terrestrial area within the space” with the Guggenheim satellite tv for pc plan. Urdaibai was designated as a Unesco biosphere reserve in 1984.
The scheme’s backers, together with the Basque regional authorities, say nonetheless that the deliberate museum hub would appeal to funding and create jobs. “With forecasts of 148,000 guests and the related expenditure of €31.2m per yr, the annual financial affect would stand at round €78.1m, €41.1m of which might profit the CAPV [the Basque autonomous community],” a report revealed by the Guggenheim on the venture advantages, and seen by The Artwork Newspaper, states.
The stories estimates the price of the museum at €128m: €80m to assemble the buildings and outside areas; €40m for charges, permits, honoraria, furnishings and gear, installations and programs; and €8m to develop and coordinate the venture.
The Guggenheim Urdaibai Cease Platform group disagrees: “A venture of this nature won’t revitalise the socio-economic state of affairs of our area in any respect; slightly, it might condemn us to precariousness and the lack of our id.”
The Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997, is now inseparable from the so-called “Bilbao impact”, the method by which an architecturally flashy cultural venture revitalises an ailing post-industrial metropolis. In response to The Artwork Newspaper’s annual attendance survey, the museum drew 1.3 million guests in 2024, a 2% drop from 2023.
