It felt, for quite some time there, like the age of Frank Gehry would nev­er end. But now that the lat­est defin­ing fig­ure of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture — or tech­ni­cal­ly, Cana­di­an-Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture — has died at the age of 96, the time has come to ask when, exact­ly, his age began. Or rather, with which build­ing: Walt Dis­ney Con­cert Hall in Los Ange­les? The Louis Vuit­ton Foun­da­tion in Paris? The rad­i­cal ren­o­va­tion of his own hum­ble San­ta Mon­i­ca home often cit­ed at the ori­gin point of the metal­lic, delib­er­ate­ly incon­gru­ous, often near­ly alien aes­thet­ic now rec­og­nized around the world? Accord­ing to the B1M video above, it is to the Guggen­heim Muse­um Bil­bao we must look to if we wish to under­stand the archi­tec­ture of Frank Gehry — and much else besides. The Guggen­heim Bil­bao was a chal­leng­ing project when it was first con­ceived in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties, but then, Bil­bao was a chal­lenged set­ting. Once a pros­per­ous port city, the Basque metrop­o­lis had fall­en on hard times indeed, rapid­ly dein­dus­tri­al­iz­ing with­out much in the way of alter­na­tive appeal. Bil­bao’s slight his­to­ry with …