» About Nabarralde

» Subscription

» Map of Navarre

» About Navarre
   History
   Language & Culture
   Adm/Territorial Division

» Navarre papers
   Environment
   History
   Identity
   Patrimony
   Roads
   Sovereignty
   Society
   Symbols
   Women

» Programs
   Special events
   Talks
   Newsletter/Magazine
   Articles distributed
   Content creators

» NA-leku

» Store

» Contact us

Idea Stealing, Bilbao Stoy

Francesco Lizarralde Fratelli. Milan, Italy, November 15, 2000

A large, very controversial building was built in the western part of Bilbao, a city rich in associations, most of them bad--the brutal and oppressive working and living conditions of the miners, lethal epidemics, shanty towns, fascist occupation, police repression, a "surplus" youth...

Never has a building in contemporary Bilbao had such an association with ambition, and never has ambition seemed so appropriate a tone for a city whose political and economic elites want to have it all. But there it is: The Guggenheim-Bilbao, a perfect example of the notion that any idea that is worth stealing, is worth noting for later use.

The largest Basque city, a gritty industrial port in the western Basque region, may seem an odd setting for a major new museum of 20th century art, let alone one being hailed as an architectural masterpiece. But neither the design nor the idea of making such a thing in a place like Bilbao is unique. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim-Bilbao seems to have come from Boccioni.

The Italian architect, sculptor and painter Umberto Boccioni, the leader of the Italian art movement Futurism founded in 1909, was keenly interested in finding ways to portray the passage of time or the evolution of events in time in his work. A good example of this search for time dimensionality is his 1912 architectonic sculpture Development of a Bottle in Space.

Boccioni's conception of architecture has the spectator placed at the centre of his work in a continuous physical relationship with it, as an enveloping environment, with the architectural space, and the industrial city as the place of modernity, as one of the prime elements of representation.

Futurism had a tremendous influence on 20th century western art and design. It is easy to see the influence of the Futurists on the work of Bauhaus, De Stijl, Russian Constructivists and French Cubists.

Analogies, indeed, can be drawn between leaps in the scale of Boccioni's bottle and Frank Gehry's flower to building components, between, in Boccioni, the spiraling movement into planes through an abstracted reconstruction of the object and, in Gehry, the manipulation of sculptural masses on the basis of straight line segments. Boccioni broke up the object through redistribution of its parts starting from its core, extending its plasticity into space with a spiraling, dynamic tension. Gehry, on the other hand, let his flower unfold in disparate elements, spreading sideways and downward in a fluid motion.

Boccioni sought "to abolish in sculpture, as in all arts, the traditionally 'sublime' subject matter," as he stated in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912). Gehry abolished the "sublime" in his design when he executed the flower in an industrial material, titanium, thus, demythologizing the spectacular image.

Ideas, if ever, flow spontaneously forth in original brilliance from a mind untouched by outside influences. The witch Mari does not tap lightly on our shoulder and tell us the All New Perfect and Inspired Way to design, for example, the future parliament building of the Basque Republic of Navarre for the architectural selection process. Some people's design may look like she did, but she didn't. Design is a process that works out of and through many pieces of information, from history, to cultural perception, to budget realities and more.

That doesn't mean that idea stealing can't transform into original thought. Nobody criticized film designer Eiko Ikiosha for lifting her design for Dracula's gold robe in Bram Stoker's Dracula from the painting style of Gustav Klimt. On the contrary, she received an Academy Award for Costume Design for doing so, because to adapt that style to that use was impressively appropriate new idea. And, one need hardly explain that "borrowing" costumes from Seurat's Sunday at la Grande Jatte, for Sunday in the Park with George, did nothing to reduce it's originality.

And in this relevance of the Bilbao building, are some of the issues demonstrating that it is a case of identifying the idea you need. The job is then to find the appropriate one, or ones for your creation. The new idea, the one that you will have to produce, is how to adapt the pre-existing idea to the needs of your production. This is where idea stealing metamorphoses into original thought. It was something to think about in Bilbao, by the Guggenheim Museum.

Francesco Lizarralde Fratelli is an sculptor born in Bilbo, Bizkaia. He currently resides in Milan with his wife and children.

Translation by Gigi Bidarte