Completion of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in October 1997 on a former industrial riverside site in the Basque city of Bilbao, its titanium-clad, irregularly curving forms designed with the aid of aerospace-derived CATIA software that made such complex, non-repeating geometry buildable at all. Commissioned as the centerpiece of a broader effort to revitalize a declining industrial port city, the museum had an economic and cultural impact so immediate and outsized that the phrase "the Bilbao Effect" entered planning vocabulary to describe a single landmark building transforming a city's fortunes and international profile. It is widely credited with helping open architecture's so-called digital or "blob" era, in which computer modeling allowed sculptural forms previously impossible to engineer or construct economically.