In February 1998, at the age of 91, Philip Johnson, the godfather of modern architecture, who 40 years earlier had collaborated with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on the iconic Seagram Building, in Manhattan, traveled to Spain to see the just-completed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He stood in the atrium of the massive, titanium-clad structure with its architect, Frank Gehry, as TV cameras from Charlie Rose captured him gesturing up to the torqued and sensually curving pillars that support the glass-and-steel ceiling and saying, “Architecture is not about words. It’s about tears.” Breaking into heavy sobs, he added, “I get the same feeling in Chartres Cathedral.” Bilbao had just opened its doors, but Johnson, the principal apostle of the two dominant forms of architecture in the 20th century—Modernism and Postmodernism—and the design establishment’s ultimate arbiter, was prepared to call it on the spot. He anointed Gehry “the greatest architect we have today” and later declared the structure “the greatest building of our time.”

Five years after Johnson’s death, in 2005, Vanity Fair has asked 90 of the world’s leading architects, teachers, and critics to name the five most important buildings, monuments, and bridges completed since 1980, as well as the most significant structure built so far in the 21st century. The survey’s results back up Johnson decisively: of the 52 experts who ultimately participated in the poll—including 11 Pritzker Prize winners and the deans of eight major architecture schools—28 voted for the Guggenheim Bilbao. That was nearly three times as many votes as the second-place building received. Therefore it seems fair to conclude that the 81-year-old, Canadian-born Gehry is the most important architect of our age. (He received four additional votes for three other projects: the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles; Millennium Park, in Chicago; and his house in Santa Monica.)

It is rare that a single building can be judged a transformational work. The last architectural event to have had such an impact may have been the publication of Le Corbusier’s landmark manifesto, Towards a New Architecture, in 1923, followed, in 1929, by the completion of his small, experimental Villa Savoye, outside Paris. (All-too-human footnote: the owners of the villa took le maître to court over their revolutionary—but leaky—flat roof.) “Bilbao is truly a signal moment in the architectural culture,” says the Pulitzer Prize—winning critic Paul Goldberger, author of Why Architecture Matters (2009). “The building blazed new trails and became an extraordinary phenomenon. It was one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were all completely united about something.”

“Bilbao was one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were all completely united,” says Paul Goldberger.

Achieving the Bilbao Effect

‘Gehry just let go,” the critic Mildred Friedman told Sydney Pollack in the director’s 2005 documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry. “He began to delve into all these ideas that he’d been beginning to work with and just went the whole way there. I don’t think there is a building that comes anywhere near it in this period of art history.” Thomas Krens, the former director of the Guggenheim, who commissioned the museum in Spain, said, “Bilbao has been the watershed thing for Frank. He was an interesting architect until Bilbao opened. After that, he became a transcendent architect.”

Bilbao—today one of the top tourist destinations in Europe—was such a backwater in the 1990s that, according to Gehry, the 265,000-square-foot museum, beside the Nervión River, went up almost unnoticed by the press. That only contributed to the drop-dead impact it created with its unveiling. “I like to work under the radar as much as I can. It’s been harder since I’ve gotten notorious,” says Gehry. The first photos of the near-complete structure, which resembles a gargantuan bouquet of writhing silver fish, rendered a seismic shift in the global art culture. At first, Gehry was himself unsure whether he approved of it. “You know, I went there just before the opening,” he tells me, “and looked at it and said, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done to these people?’ It took a couple of years for me to start to like it, actually.”