Architectural Materials
Titanium
Metals
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Titanium is a strong, lightweight, highly corrosion-resistant metal that entered architectural use in the late twentieth century once industrial refining, developed originally for aerospace, made structural quantities available for building cladding. Its most famous architectural application is the curved titanium panel skin of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, completed in 1997, where its subtle, shifting silver-gold sheen under changing light became integral to the building's identity, and its combination of durability, minimal maintenance and formability into complex curved shapes has since drawn a small number of other prestige buildings to it despite its cost relative to steel or aluminum.
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Clad in roughly 33,000 thin titanium panels, the single fact most associated with Gehrys design.
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Wikimedia FoundationWikipedia: Titanium, introductory paragraph, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TitaniumQuote, Wikipedia: Titanium, introductory paragraph, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium
Titanium is a chemical element; it has symbol Ti and atomic number 22. Found in nature only as an oxide, it can be reduced to produce a lustrous transition metal with a silver color, low density, and high strength that is resistant to corrosion in sea water, aqua regia, and chlorine.
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