Yesterday I saw the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao for the first time. It's every bit as spectacular as I imagined: metallic peaks and troughs, like a frozen sea of mercury. Its colours change depending on the weather, shining silver at noon and glowing softly gold at sundown. I was in Bilbao on business, speaking at the El Sol advertising festival, so naturally the marketing implications of the Guggenheim were on my mind. The museum has transformed the city both in spirit – from a slumbering post-industrial port into a major tourist destination – and physically, as other jewels of architecture have sprung up and the harbour has been remodelled with airy esplanades. The proud people of Bilbao are now even more delighted with their home, a temperate town whose delicious pintxos (the local tapas) are another excellent reason to visit.
I couldn't help comparing this to East London, which has received a major facelift, at immense cost to taxpayers, in advance of the Olympic Games. Another speaker at the conference, Mat Heinl of the London-based agency Moving Brands, told me that some Londoners were anxious about the security implications of the Olympics. He compared the event to an approaching zeppelin, or a cloud on the horizon – impressive but daunting. Let's hope that, like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the cloud has a silver lining.
