The Edmonton Journal

One morning this July, I drove into Bilbao, Spain. It was early, as everyone says you have to get there early. After negotiating the oddly marked highways, I parked in a downtown garage two kilometres from the Guggenheim. Several impatient minutes later, out of breath, approaching Frank Gehry's titanium sculpture, I felt like a 16-year-old boy seeing his first naked girl. The magnificent, yet oddly welcoming, structure did what architecture, like all art, is supposed to do: the building confused and excited me, made me want to touch and explore it. And I wasn't alone. The lineup to get inside the Guggenheim snaked through the lobby and up a long series of stairs for close to an hour.