There is no doubt that Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is one of the most spectacular buildings of recent years. It is both the heart of the city and a tested for the arts, representing both public presence and artistic change.
Kurt W. Forster studied art history, literature and archaeology at the universities in Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Florence and London. He taught at Yale University (1960-67), Stanford University (1967-82) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1982-84), and then became the first director of the newly established Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica (1984-92), where he inaugurated a broadly based programme of research and publications. After that he taught again, now at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich (1992-99). Before achieving his present position as director of the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio he was director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (1999-2001). Ralph Richter studied at the Fachhochschule Dortmund. He rapidly made a name for himself as an architectural photographer. He also took the photographs for Opus 21: Norman Foster, Commerzbank, Frankfurt am Main.
