The museum’s interior is also cool just because it’s so damn big. According to the museum, “Site-specific and outdoor installations by contemporary artists, responding to the spaces of the Frank Gehry building, are integral to the Collection of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.” You can see this in the first floor which contains a giant room the size of an airplane hangar. It’s currently housing a sculpture exhibit (photo) by Richard Serra. It’s hard to imagine any other museum hosting pieces of this scale together in one room (In fact, Serra says he created these monumental hot-rolled steel sculptures in response to the organic form of the space).

The art is always rotating at the Guggenheim too. The current main exhibit, which takes up the rest of the museum, is on Archisculpture, the relationship between architecture and sculpture. It was fascinating. Especially helpful: The architectural models and sculptures are presented at the same size which reveals a lot of interesting relationships.

The placement of crisp, exacting, and accurate architectural models next to more richly figured sculptures sets up curious tensions; tensions that demonstrate profoundly that beyond the iconic silhouette, materiality, texture, solid, void, shadow, luminance, and lustre—to name just a few of the many sensory constituents of a sculpture—are as fundamental to architecture as they are to sculpture.

Bottom Line: The Bilbao Guggenheim lives up to they hype (especially if you can visit when there are top-notch exhibitions, like now). If you’re ever in the neighborhood, make sure to stop by.