During his seventeen-year tenure at the helm of New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Thomas Krens has masterminded an unprecedented buildup, adding far flung Guggenheim branches in Berlin, Las Vegas and, of course, Bilbao. In an exclusive interview by Aric Chen in Hintmag, he lets us in on what it takes to host a Guggenheim.
Most expansion-minded museum directors—in other words, all of them—would be happy just to get a new wing built. But during his seventeen-year tenure at the helm of New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Thomas Krens has masterminded an unprecedented buildup, adding far flung Guggenheim branches in Berlin, Las Vegas and, of course, Bilbao. Along with the museum's landmark Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home base in New York and its Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, these outposts have helped Krens usher in an era of museums as global cultural enterprises, not just singular institutions. All the while, his Guggenheim Bilbao, with its famous titanium-clad Frank Gehry design, has set off a rush for iconic architecture in cities around the world vying for a spot on the international cultural map. read more
