Arch1390 Digital Representation Studio: WEEK09 - 3D MODELLING ,PHOTO COMPARISONS & CASE STUDY

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Instantly hailed as the most important structure of its time, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao recently celebrated a decade of extraordinary success on October 19, 2007. With close to ninety exhibitions and over ten million visitors to its credit, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao forever changed the way the world thinks about museums, and it continues to challenge our assumptions about the connections between art, architecture, and collecting.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a collection of interconnected blocks housing galleries, an auditorium, a restaurant, a museum store and administrative offices. These buildings have as their central focus a single architectural composition. With its towering roof, which is reminiscent of a metallic flower, the museum will enliven the riverfront and serve as a spectacular gateway to the city.
From the beginning, the architecture of the building that would eventually house the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was recognized as a decisive factor in making the project the international landmark of artistic excellence it was designed to be. This approach continued the tradition begun by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation when it commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design the original museum on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Frank O. Gehry was entrusted with the task of designing the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, largely because his conceptions reflected the project's enormous potential by integrating the building into the fabric of the city of Bilbao and into its ongoing urban regeneration plan.
Gehry’s huge sculpture-like building is fashioned from a surprising array of materials and endowed with an extraordinary, unmistakable silhouette. Under the apparent chaos caused by the juxtaposition of fragmented volumes with regular forms finished in stone, curved forms covered with titanium and huge glass walls, the building revolves around a central axis, the atrium, a monumentally empty space crowned by a metal dome. Daylight floods in through the glass walls and the skylight set high up in the dome. Leading off from this central space, a system of curved walkways, glass lifts and stairways connect 19 galleries that combine classical, rectangular spaces with others of unusual proportions and forms. The wealth and variety of spaces makes the museum exceptionally versatile. The notion of the collection as encyclopaedic overview is reflected in the chronological distribution of the works in rectangular galleries housed in the regular, stone-covered volumes. This overview is complemented by the in-depth spaces devoted to specific artists, for whose work 9 galleries of special forms and spectacular dimensions are reserved in the titanium-finished volumes. Temporary exhibitions and large-format works are housed in an exceptional, 30 metre wide gallery which stretches along nearly 130 metres of column-free space located in the impressive volume that runs under the imposing La Salve bridge. This space culminates in a tower which integrates the bridge itself into the intersection of volumes that configure the building.

REFERENCES:
FROM Paul Catermole with Ian Westwell. BIZZARE BUILDINGS. p12-14.
http://www.greatbuildings.com/cgi-bin/gbi.cgi/Guggenheim_Bilbao.html/cid_bilbao_004.html
http://www.bm30.es/homegug_uk.html
http://www.guggenheim.org/bilbao
http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/guggenheim-museum-bilbao-landmark.htm
http://www.students.sbc.edu/muglia07/arthsrsem/GNYfloorplan.gif

GROUP WORK MODELLING IN REVIT: