Bilbao museum opens €45m floating gallery Agravitas
Bilbao's Fine Arts Museum opens a €45 million bridge in the sky on 6 October 2026.
The new wing doubles exhibition space to about 6,000 sq. m. It also remodels 8,000 sq. m. of existing galleries, according to The Art Newspaper.
The extension is called Agravitas. It is a 55-metre-long elevated gallery designed by Foster + Partners in London with Bilbao architect Luis María Uriarte.
The structure works like a bridge. Large V-shaped columns straddle the older museum buildings without touching their original fabric. It was built in locally produced steel as a nod to Bilbao's industrial heritage, Dezeen reported.
Agravitas spans the two existing buildings and a former open space at the centre of the site. That move creates a new ground-floor hall with a glazed facade, filled with sculpture. Above it sit column-free galleries lit by skylights that can let in daylight or be blacked out for sensitive shows.
The scale shift is large. A new 1,000 sq. m. atrium acts as a visitor centre with routes into old and new rooms. It will serve a permanent collection of around 2,000 paintings, 500 sculptures and 800 decorative arts objects.
The old parts have their own history. The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in northern Spain joins a Neo-Classical building from 1945 and a Modernist building from 1970 influenced by Mies van der Rohe. Both were renovated in 2001 by Uriarte. This time the team also restored the older fabric and reopened the original 1940s entrance for the first time in decades.
Up top, the building is built for looking out as well as in. Offices sit alongside roof terraces with views across the city. The uppermost floor holds temporary exhibitions plus a viewing terrace and restaurant facing the city and surrounding hills.
It is also built for sun. Overhanging roofs give solar shading, and rooftop photovoltaic panels, which turn sunlight into electricity, help power the site.
The project began with a contest. Foster + Partners won an international competition in 2019 with a joint entry with LM Uriarte Arkitektura S.L.P. filed under the pseudonym "Agravitas". The structural design was developed with Spanish engineer Julio Martínez Calzón, founder of MC2 Estudio de Ingeniería. Funding came from Basque, regional, provincial and city authorities with the privately owned BBK Banking Foundation.
For visitors, this means more room and easier routes. The museum says the work improves links with its neighbour, the Guggenheim Bilbao in Bilbao. The expanded site also adds a space for architecture and design, a documentation and research centre, an education centre and rooms for family activities and workshops.
