Shortly after Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain, Hubert de Givenchy took me there. I knew nothing about the museum at the time, but I would follow Hubert and camp out on an iceberg in Antarctica if he suggested it. I was intimate with a lot of museums in a lot of countries but not Bilbao, so I was an innocent, and when we drove down the old Bilbao street approaching the Guggenheim from the south, I had the distinct impression it had just landed and that I was witnessing an arrival from another planet.

Click here to take a virtual trip to Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao

The museum seemed to reach out and pull me in. I noticed it was breathing and I saw clearly that it was alive. I had an urge to hurry, to get inside the extraordinary building before it took off. I also had a strong sense that what I was witnessing was about something very good. And I am not the hallucinatory type.

Years later, I met Frank at a dinner at Candy Bergen’s and told him, nervously, to be honest, I had never seen a building that as-alive before. I said I thought he had connected with something few have connected with even when building cathedrals. He said he knew exactly what I meant. He hadn’t known many — a few perhaps — who had witnessed that the actual development of the design and construction had been normal but, yes, he knew exactly what I was talking about.

I kept meaning to return. My summer house is now a boat so last year, along with almost everyone else who has a boat, I started the summer in Barcelona – possibly the liveliest town on the Mediterranean – and the town is not far from Bilbao. Friends who had not yet been to the Guggenheim in Bilbao and were excited to see it – and the new Barcelona – sailed along. We were all happy researchers and, after a couple of books, it was clear that we would be seeing a lot of Antoni Gaudi, the most famous architect and, maybe, the most famous star born in Barcelona. Later, afterward, after Our Experience, after we left Spain, we agreed it was our great good fortune to have seen Gaudi and Gehry back to back.

One of my friends is a Gaudi cultist; he wouldn’t leave home to see the work of a minimalist, rationalist architect no matter how gifted. He needs to feel staggering genius. He wants miracles. For him, surfaces must move, glass and concrete must flare without support, and he wants his money’s worth if he is going to get out of bed and bother about a building. He knew all about Gaudi – we didn’t really need the guides. He explained everything with passion. Gaudi thought that everything structural had already been created in nature, and he found his virtuoso solutions there. He created only a few houses, but what houses they are, wondrous things those houses. Turtles and tortoises hold up the beautiful columns, cast iron spiders pretend to be balconies and swirl under windows, sky lighting fills the houses with glowing light, air conditioning (before there was such a thing) cools the houses – genius operating ahead of its time. Gaudi’s roofs are like stage sets. They have sculptured chimneys that could be guardians from another planet – it is said that George Lucas based Darth Vader on them. These are supra-intelligent houses and great fun to see.