Guggenheim Museum and Puppy

Before you are two icons at once. The building of silver curves is the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, by Frank O. Gehry, opened on 18 October 1997. And the giant dog is Puppy, by Jeff Koons: a 12.4-metre West Highland White Terrier with a steel frame, an internal watering system and some 38,000 plants that are changed twice a year.

1The Guggenheim effect

Where the museum now stands there were docks, railway tracks and industrial land. The Basque institutions bet on a franchise of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and Gehry designed a building with hardly a flat surface, clad in titanium sheets a third of a millimetre thick and in a limestone eventually found in Huéscar, in Granada. From the river it looks like a ship; from above, like a flower. Visitors topped a million a year, and the press named the phenomenon the “Guggenheim effect” or “Bilbao effect”: a city in industrial crisis reinventing itself through culture.

2A name on the square

Puppy arrived in September 1997. On 13 October, five days before the opening, ETA terrorists posing as gardeners tried to plant flowerpots packed with explosives beside the sculpture. The Basque police officer José María Agirre stopped them and was shot dead. This square now bears his name.

Koons said Puppy was inspired by the balance between the eternal and the ephemeral in Baroque cathedrals.

3What to look for

• Puppy’s flowers, which change with the seasons.
• The titanium scales, which shift colour with the light.
• The name of the square, dedicated to José María Agirre.