What a face!

When the Guggenheim Museum was inaugurated in Bilbao in 1997, designed by American architect Frank Gehry, there was almost unanimous consensus within the profession, as well as among the general public, regarding the architectural quality of the building. Not only because it showcased a coherent research trajectory by the same author of the project, but also because the building poetically synthesized the city’s steel and industrial past.

Stranded on the shores of Bilbao, the building of twisted steel and covered with titanium scales appeared as an allegory of the disappeared Euskalduna and Blast Furnaces shipyards that surrounded the city and that, for a long period of its history, stained it with smoke and shadow.

That is why no one understood that years later, in the middle of a field of vineyards in La Rioja, a similar building would appear. And another in Minnesota and another in Los Angeles… The cultural, geographical and historical context that seemed to have guided the conception of the building in Bilbao was not so evident in the rest of the clone buildings that appeared in the years surrounding the Biscayan proposal.

This past spring-summer season of 2023, Gaudí’s La Pedrera hosted a retrospective exhibition of the work of Jaume Plensa. An interesting exhibition for its undeniable artistic quality that used as a claim an enormous white bust located on the sidewalk of the chamfer in front of Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona. A figure to which the author has already accustomed us and which was located a few meters from another permanent one, practically identical, this time bronze-colored, on the corner of the Palau de la Música Catalana, in the small square of Lluís Millet, right where it opens onto Via Laietana.

We have seen similar busts in New York, Venice, Madrid or Rio de Janeiro. Some are temporary and others are permanent, which, through repetition, end up turning the urban landscape into a peculiar Easter Island with ‘Moais’ to the taste of all audiences.

The doubt, as in the case of the Guggenheim clones, is whether the intellectual process that led to the original work has also existed in the later repetitions or whether it is rather a matter of getting the maximum possible return from a popular success that has become iconic.

There is no city that wants to be worshipped, that does not have its Calatrava bridge, its twisted building or its super obese figure of the late Fernando Botero

It is not only the authors of the works who lend themselves to this game. Governors and mayors, eager to make a profit from their mandate and place their city on the map, trade on media successes from other latitudes.

There is no city that wants to be praised that does not have its Calatrava bridge, its twisted building or its super obese figure of the late Fernando Botero.

Seen from a global perspective, no matter how much they want to dress it up differently, our cities end up being franchises of these works, like Starbucks, McDonald’s or Five Guys burger joints.

The interest that these works arouse in our politicians carries a double danger. On the one hand, creative freedom ends up being conditioned by the commission they receive: they want something like that of that other city, from a different time and context. On the other, it forces an irremediable accommodation on the part of the authors which, again, is to the detriment of the critical spirit and the intrinsic risk of any creative act.

In any case, citizens often receive a cultural offer and an urban landscape that is uniform on a global scale and, often, trivialized. This also makes it difficult for other new or more risky cultural manifestations of young people to emerge. Artists, architects and creators who struggle to have their own voice and who, when they see a repeated object of these characteristics appear, must think: “What a face!”