Two years ago I made the trek to Bilbao to find out what all the commotion was about. I went with my critical antennae poised because the slavish adulation was getting irritating. The Bilbao Effect was visible everywhere, from professional journals to travel magazines to middlebrow glossies (the New Yorker was organizing group tours), from the cover of the New York Times Magazine to polemics like Victoria Newhouse’s Towards a New Museum. Newhouse’s book culminates with Frank Gehry, of course, and the allusion in her title is to Le Corbusier’s revolutionary tract (was she implying that museums like Gehry’s could save the world?). Other critics were blathering in metaphors: exultant eruption, frozen explosion, stormy volumes, floral splendor, titanium tentacles, Tower of Babel, a Basque bomb, "Lourdes for a crippled culture," the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe (these last two from the imagination of Herbert Muschamp). Someone less charitable said something about a pheasant on a platter, but this was a minority opinion.

And I was disarmed, just like the Basque terrorists. Didn’t they declare a cease-fire for a year and a half shortly after the building opened, all because the museum made everyone feel optimistic again about Bilbao? Right. Still, the eyewitnesses had hardly exaggerated. The building was a knockout. Standing in the colossal central space with all that glass, stone, and titanium splintering around you, you were reduced to monosyllables: Wow, wow. The installation of Serra’s "Torqued Ellipses" in the soaring, 420-foot-long "fish" gallery. Wow. You could take all your architectural theory, Derridean, Deleuzian, whatever, and make a paper boat out of it and sail it right down Bilbao’s muddy river Nervión— standing, of course, on that marvelous promenade along the bank with the exhilarating view of the bridge that springs up and over to the far side of the city and getting mesmerized by the coruscating reflections in the metallic shingles.

What was so bouleversant was not just that one was in the presence of an auratic artwork. Everybody knows that Benjamin’s notion that the aura would wither away in the age of technical reproduction was a pipe dream. The spectaculture demands its sites of pilgrimage; architourism requires destinations. But the concept that a single building in a marginal place could so destabilize the gyroscope of contemporary culture was something else. Hadn’t the design of architecture been relegated to the job of infill and modification in the late-twentieth-century "collage city"? Wasn’t postmodernism all about curbing architectural hubris? (Aldo Rossi: "To what, then, could I have aspired in my craft? Certainly to small things, having seen that the possibility of great ones was historically precluded.") Wasn’t the fetishization of bricks and mortar— even glass and titanium— strictly ice age in the epoch of electronic flows?

All the same, one could hardly get rid of the sensation that the architect was huddling behind a little curtain somewhere in that vertiginous atrium, working his effects like the humbug wizard. The spectacular, hyperkinetic play of surfaces, the concealment of the apparatus— unlike at Beaubourg, the counterexample, where the guts hang out in an ostentatious, color-coded display on the transparent facades— left one feeling not just bedazzled but weightless and disoriented. Only the construction photos betrayed the dinosaurlike carcass underneath.