I have this fantasy road trip. Bearing in mind that I am among the world’s more reluctant travellers, especially if the travelling involves big airports, which I loathe, even the notion of fantasy travelling is unusual.
So if it was ever going to happen at all – Covid passports and amber lists permitting – it would be a road trip.
The original idea was simple enough. From the moment Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao was opened in October 1997, the building has haunted me.
It keeps on turning up in my life in the most unexpected places, the most unanticipated moments. I decided I would go and see it. Flying was not an option.
I can date my interest in architecture from an ill-fated plan to go to Fleet Street as a 20-year-old journalist on this newspaper.
I was recommended to a newspaper in Coventry that had a reputation for feeding young journalists to Fleet Street. I lasted two months, was horribly homesick, and came back to Dundee with my tail between my legs.
What saved me from total insanity in that time was the discovery of the architectural wonder that is Basil Spence’s Coventry Cathedral.
A new passion was born out of the ruins of my Fleet Street ambition.
The cathedral was a kind of metaphor, for it was born out of the ruins of the old cathedral which was burst apart by Second World War bombs.
Gehry changed my ideas about what was possible in architecture.
The Guggenheim is titanium, glass and limestone and it curves voluptuously. It plays mesmerising games with light.
It put Bilbao’s name on the lips of the world. There had been nothing like it.
My other interest in Spain is the guitar. I have played since I was 14. Throughout my jazz guitar-playing life while a string of indifferent electric guitars came and went, I occasionally messed with classical guitar.
The idea grew of buying a good classical guitar, but that it should be made in Spain, by a Spaniard. So the road trip fantasy was born.
Maybe a few diversions
I would drive to Bilbao, then down through the heart of Spain to the Andalucian heartland of the Spanish guitar, find a Spanish guitar maker, sift through his workshop where the perfect guitar lay in wait.
Then events started to get in the way.
First of all, Frank Gehry came to Dundee. In 2003 he built the exquisite Maggie’s Centre as a tribute to his friend Maggie Jencks, and waived his fee.
This put an extra sheen on the aura of admiration through which I regarded his work.
Then, in 2014, he built the wondrous Louis Vuitton Foundation building on the edge of Paris.
So now the road trip would definitely go via France.
And if it was to go via Paris and then drive down through the heart of France it would be necessary to go via Norman Foster’s sensational Millau Gorge bridge of 2005.
If you have never seen images of that colossal beauty, may I suggest you check it out.
The road trip had evolved into an architectural pilgrimage with a Spanish guitar soundtrack.
And still, events kept nudging it in new directions.
This year has produced three. Anyone acquainted with this column will know that I have a passion for wolves.
In March, I was alerted to a decision by the Spanish Government to give legal protection to the population of Iberian wolves in the north-west of the country, in other words, just to the south of Bilbao.
Wolf howls were added to the road trip’s soundtrack.
Next, I was doing some business with a local guitar shop when I mentioned that I had bought my first ever really good electric guitar during lockdown and that my sole remaining ambition was that Spanish road trip guitar.
To which he said: “I’ve got one right here.”
Have guitar, will travel
And he had. It was a very classy classical guitar made by Antonio Sanchez 26 years ago in Paterna in Valencia.
The price was reduced because of some scuff marks on the body.
I decided I could put up with them, and who knew when Covid would allow me a long road trip through France and Spain?
I bought the guitar and the road trip was shorn of its guitar-buying leg.
Time to go
But why am I telling you all this now?
Because last week, at the age of 92, Frank Gehry unveiled an astonishing twisted tower with more than a passing resemblance to a Scottish tower house (check out the crowstep gables) and a glass-and-steel rotunda on an arts campus at Arles in the south of France.
The tower’s 11,000 steel panels honour the painting Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, Arles’s most famous resident. The rotunda is a homage to Arles’s Roman amphitheatre. I was immediately hooked.
Top five this week | Frank Gehry on his tower for LUMA Arles in France, clad in 11,000 shimmering stainless-steel tiles: ‘I kept thinking about what the light was like for Van Gogh’ https://t.co/PA1an40Izx
— The Art Newspaper (@TheArtNewspaper) June 27, 2021
So… south to Paris’s Louis Vuitton, Millau Gorge, Bilbao’s Guggenheim, and Iberian wolves.
Then, I might just turn round and do it all again travelling north.
Memo to self: pack the guitar and have someone take a photograph of you playing it on the steps of the Guggenheim. It’s for the cover of the book.