Celebrated immediately upon its opening in October 1997, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is now acknowledged as one of the greatest buildings of the twentieth century. The extraordinary titanium-clad building by the Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry has put the previously ignored city of Bilbao on the wish list of every cultural tourist.

There are similarities between the curvaceous, burnished form on the shore of the Atlantic and the highly individualist buildings by Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) in Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast. Fantastical, organic and brazen masterpieces frame a century distinguished otherwise by a markedly different orthodoxy of design. Gaudí’s creations took the possibilities of Art Nouveau to an unparalleled extreme. Revered by Catalans during his lifetime, regarded elsewhere as an eccentric curiosity for the next half century, Gaudí is now one of the most popular and influential of all architects.

As a candidate for beatification, the first artist since Fra Angelico to enjoy such endorsement, the ultra religious Gaudí has come back into favour as an architect who pioneered an eco-friendly, sculptural and organic style that has led some to describe him as the father of post-modernism.

If Gehry’s Guggenheim has been called the signature building of the 20th century it must not be forgotten that it is Gaudí’s millennial creation, the Sagrada Familia - started 125 years ago and still decades away from completion - that remains the building that has carried us into the 21st century.

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