It is one of several museums affiliated to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and features permanent and visiting exhibits of works by Spanish and international artists.

The building, designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, was built alongside the Nervion River, which runs through the city to the Cantabrian Sea.

In exchange, the foundation agreed to manage the institution, rotate parts of its permanent collection through the Bilbao museum and organize temporary exhibitions.

[8] About 5,000 residents of Bilbao attended a preopening extravaganza outside the museum on the night preceding the official opening, featuring an outdoor light show and concerts.

[5] On the 13 October, two ETA militants shot dead a Basque policeman who interrupted their attempt to set up grenade launchers to attack the opening.

[10] The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation selected Frank Gehry as the architect, and its director, Thomas Krens, encouraged him to design something daring and innovative.

[12] The interior "is designed around a large, light-filled atrium with views of Bilbao's estuary and the surrounding hills of the Basque country".

[6] When the museum opened to the public in 1997, it was immediately hailed as one of the world's most spectacular buildings in the style of Deconstructivism (although Gehry does not associate himself with that architectural movement),[14] a masterpiece of the 20th century.

[15] Architect Philip Johnson described it as "the greatest building of our time",[16] while critic Calvin Tomkins, in The New Yorker, characterized it as "a fantastic dream ship of undulating form in a cloak of titanium," its brilliantly reflective panels also reminiscent of fish scales.

[5] The 11,000 m2 of exhibition space are distributed over nineteen galleries, ten of which follow a classic orthogonal plan that can be identified from the exterior by their stone finishes.

[4][17] In 2005, it housed Richard Serra's monumental installation The Matter of Time, which Robert Hughes dubbed "courageous and sublime".

Third, he used computer visualizations produced by Rick Smith employing Dassault Systemes' CATIA V3 software[19][20] and collaborated closely with the individual building trades to control costs during construction.

Titanium is a low-polluting material, and each part has been designed differently according to its orientation on the building, so they correspond perfectly with the curves desired by Gehry.

The architects applied Master Modeling and Virtual Build Processes they learned from Rick Smith[23][24] and his use of the same techniques on the Walt Disney Concert Hall during the previous two years.

Most pieces came from the Guggenheim's permanent collection, but the museum also acquired paintings by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still and commissioned new works by Francesco Clemente, Anselm Kiefer, Jenny Holzer and Richard Serra.

The regional council estimated that the money visitors spent on hotels, restaurants, shops and transport allowed it to collect €100 million in taxes, which more than paid for the building cost.

[35] According to a report issued in 2007 by the Basque Court of Auditors, the museum paid more than US$27 million for the acquisition of art between 2002 and 2005, including Serra's The Matter of Time for the cavernous ground-floor gallery.