Could This Be Obama's Puppy?

BILBAO, Spain--Steel covered with flowering plants, that's this Jeff Koons sculpture, titled simply Puppy, on the plaza of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum. Sure Seattle's got a Gehry museum of its own, the EMP; sure, Seattle's got Richard Sera and Louise Bourgeois sculptures, too.

But the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, as it's officially known, gave this industrial and financial center a new sense of pride and purpose. The capital of the Basque Country, Spain's fifth-largest population center (roughly the size of metropolitan Seattle), Bilbao was reenergized by an urban renewal scheme in the early 1990s that moved shipping and manufacturing into the estuary and allowed for the development of new cultural buildings along the riverfront--capped by Gehry's titanium-clad museum.

It's too easy to complain that the Experience Music Project was built on the cheap with Gehry's leftover Bilbao designs. And yet the effect of the Bilbao building's vast spaces and shimmering surface certainly do exceed whatever little aesthetic appeal the EMP offers. Hard to believe the two buildings are by the same architect. Just as it's hard to believe that a 42-foot West Highland Terrier could be lovable. Malia, Sasha, better head to the pound after all. Arf!