Location: Bilbao, Spain

Design Team: Foster + Partners + LM Uriarte Arkitektura

Area: 6,900 m²

Year: 2026

Photography: Nigel Young / Foster + Partners, Gregory Gibbon / Foster + Partners

Design Features: Architectural journeys through Bilbao often begin and end with Frank Gehry's Guggenheim. A short walk away, the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum offers another way to understand the city. Rather than replacing the past with a new icon, it reconnects the museum's 1945 classical building, its 1970 modernist extension and contemporary civic life. The Agravitas project by Foster + Partners and local practice LM Uriarte Arkitektura adds and renovates 6,900 m², becoming the latest layer in an institution that has always grown through accumulation.

Instead of occupying the remaining open ground, the new volume is suspended above the existing buildings like a 55-metre bridge. Two pairs of deep V-shaped supports transfer the principal loads to the ground, allowing the 1945 and 1970 structures to remain largely untouched beyond restoration. Inside, two levels provide 2,300 m² of flexible exhibition space, including an approximately 1,300 m² column-free gallery at the top. Continuous rooflights can move from even daylight to full blackout as exhibitions change in scale and medium.

The museum's most consequential transformation occurs beneath this bridge. The covered Arriaga Plaza gathers entrances, courtyards and circulation routes from different periods into a daylit civic interior, while the original 1940s entrance facing the city square reopens after decades. Sculptures by Richard Serra, Pablo Palazuelo and Eduardo Chillida enter this sequence of arrival, so the experience of art begins before the ticketed galleries, unfolding between street, park and interior.

The new building's horizontal reach also speaks to Bilbao's industrial history. Locally produced steel forms the bridge structure, while a self-shading facade and more than 500 m² of rooftop photovoltaics reduce operational demand; the array can provide roughly half of the museum's heating requirement. The extension does not imitate the brick and stone of the older buildings. Its slender edges, rounded corners and precise metal surfaces remain deliberately distinct, concentrating considerable weight at a few points so the ground can continue to support walking, meeting and informal occupation.

If the Guggenheim changed how the world imagined Bilbao through a singular sculptural presence, the Fine Arts Museum reveals another kind of urban renewal, one based on preservation, suspension and connection. The two museums are not competitors in style but complementary civic experiences. One draws attention towards the river through a powerful image; the other returns a century of collections, architectural layers and everyday public life to the edge of Doña Casilda Park.

Design Team: Foster + Partners was founded by Norman Foster in London in 1967 and has since developed into an international practice spanning architecture, engineering, urban design and industrial design. Its work repeatedly explores the relationship between long-span structures, lightweight construction, environmental performance and public space, with cultural projects including the Great Court at the British Museum, the Sainsbury Centre and the extension of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The practice works through an integrated approach to architecture, structure and environmental engineering. The Bilbao project was led by Taba Rasti and Pablo Urango Lillo from the Madrid studio, extending the firm's research into placing new structures above existing buildings while keeping the ground available for public life. Here, the bridge is both exhibition space and connective infrastructure between several architectural periods.

Design Team: LM Uriarte Arkitektura is led by Bilbao architect Luis María Uriarte and has worked extensively on cultural, educational and public buildings across the Basque Country. Uriarte was responsible for the museum's previous extension, opened in 2001, bringing a sustained understanding of its collection, existing buildings and urban setting to the latest transformation.

In Agravitas, that local knowledge is fundamental rather than supplementary. Foster + Partners and LM Uriarte Arkitektura jointly answered the competition's demand for expansion while preserving the historic buildings and reorganising entrances, galleries, learning spaces and urban routes. The collaboration brings international structural expertise and a long familiarity with Bilbao's architectural context into one restrained and legible renewal strategy.