The Millennium Park effect

NEW CATCH PHRASE was in the air after Frank Gehry's shimmering Guggenheim Museum made its spectacular debut eight years ago in the tattered shipbuilding city of Bilbao, Spain: "the Bilbao effect." The term, which sounded like weather forecasting jargon, spoke to the way a dazzling avant-garde work of architecture could instantly warm a city's artistic and business climates, attracting tourists by the planeload and turning a forgotten industrial outpost into a world cultural mecca.

By Blair Kamin

June 26, 2005