Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

Conceriege.com — where inspired travel starts — had this interesting take on those architects they consider as visionary.

In 1997, when Frank Gehry unveiled his very funky curving titanium museum in a backwater city in northern Spain (”Bil-where?”), few would have predicted the impact the building would have on both architecture and tourism.

Ten years later, the so-called “Bilbao Effect”—the idea that a mid-tier city can boost tourism by hiring big-name architects to give it a design makeover—has been applied in destinations from Milwaukee and Minneapolis to Newcastle, England, and Abu Dhabi.

The results have been mixed, but there’s no question that sensational new architecture gets some people excited enough to get on a plane.

So to mark the Guggenheim’s tenth anniversary, Conceriege.com took a closer look at the skyline-altering projects that Gehry and his razzle-dazzle colleagues have created, as well as what they’ve got on the drawing board.

Some of the highlights of these projects include:

Renzo Piano’s Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome has been dubbed the “cockroaches.”

Before Piano’s ambitious Shard of glass skyscraper can finally begin construction on the south bank of the Thames at the end of 2007, some tricky demolition work is required to rid the space of the current occupant, the eyesore known as Southwark Towers.

In its place, at 1,004 feet high, the elegant, needlelike Shard will be the tallest building in Britain and will likely be the most influential of the new skyscrapers appearing on the city’s skyline due to its size and unusual shape. Completion date is set for 2010.

Zaha Hadid’s tour de force so far is the Guangzhou Opera House in China, currently under construction and due for completion at the end of 2008. This project shows her ongoing fascination with dunelike formations, a legacy of her frequent trips to the marshlands of Southern Iraq as a young girl. The opera house, which will hold 1,800 audience members, could have landed from another galaxy, with two undulating “boulders” that are bathed in bold colors, evoking the high drama of Chinese opera.

Paris is not fond of skyscrapers. One hundred and 18 years after it was built, the Eiffel Tower remains the tallest structure in the city. It took a proposal as poetic as Mayne’s Phare Tower to finally change the skyline (well, it will in 2012).

For many, the Phare (which means “lighthouse” in French) is a sign that Mayne’s radical approach is softening: It rises skywards from the soulless landscape of La Défense (a peripheral business district) like a white phoenix.

From Herzog & de Meuron’s Olympic Stadium in Beijing to Thom Mayne’s otherworldly Phare Tower in Paris (which will be taller than the Eiffel Tower), we haven’t seen a bigger boom in massive public projects since Ancient Rome. Which gives you new reasons to visit both the cities you’ve never thought of as interesting and those you claim to know like the back of your hand. Just think of Bilbao’s Guggenheim as the shining example.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 6:17:43 PM and is filed under HMmmm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.