ArchiSculpture: Dialogues Between Architecture and Sculpture

The ArchiSculpture exhibition is on view through February 26, 2006.

Revolutionary innovations in construction and project design offered by new digital technologies, coupled with the development of new materials, have enabled architects to create buildings with the most unusual and evocative shapes.

Bilbao was one of the first to discover that attractive sculptural architecture could serve as an effective "marketing" tool for attracting attention and luring visitors to the city, a strategy known the world over as "the Bilbao effect".

A number of buildings have followed in the footsteps of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao "archisculpture", including Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar in Barcelona, OMA's (Rem Koolhaas) Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), Santiago Calatrava's "Turning Torso" (2005) in Malmø, and Zaha Hadid's new Phaeno Science Centre (2005) in Wolfsburg.

The exhibition traces the relationship between sculpture and architecture from the eighteenth century to the present, bringing together a selection of 180 sculptures, paintings, and models of buildings, by some 60 artists and 50 architects.

Works by renowned sculptors are placed beside architectural models allowing visitors to draw direct comparisons between the two disciplines, and demonstrating how important the paradigmatic function of modern sculpture is to today's