Guggenheim Bilbao: Gehry Building Tour with Admission and Audio Guide

The guided part of this ticket is about the building and how it came to be, and the interior is left to the visitor afterward. A guide walks the group through the history of Frank Gehry's design and construction, a 24,000 square meter structure fitted into the urban fabric of Bilbao, and stops at the sculptures around it, including Puppy and Maman.

That history gives a guide plenty to work with. Construction ran from October 1993 to October 1997 on a former port site in a bend of the Nervión, and Gehry used CATIA, software that came out of the aerospace industry, to turn the design into a buildable structure. Outside stand Jeff Koons' Puppy, a flower-covered stainless steel terrier from 1992, and Louise Bourgeois' Maman, a bronze, marble and steel spider from 1999.

When the guide is done, the visit carries on at the visitor's own speed. Admission covers the interior, and the audio guide supplied by the museum picks up the exhibitions. The split suits people who want the story of the architecture from a person and prefer to look at the art without a group.