The Bilbao Guggenheim attracts Dan Brown, too

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is the starting point for Origin, the eagerly-awaited new novel by the American writer Dan Brown. The book is part of the successful series of novels featuring the Harvard researcher Robert Langdon, which were catapulted to fame thanks to the Da Vinci Code. The museum's sinuous shapes combine with its futuristic appearance to make it an ideal setting for a thriller involving science, technology and invention. It is precisely a major discovery by the inventor Edmond Krisch that will “change the image of science forever” that leads professor Langdon to the Guggenheim where, as usual, a thrilling adventure begins. The novel mixes ancient and modern, and the Guggenheiim and the city of Bilbao combine both these things. The museum designed by Frank Gehry, with its innovative architecture made up of curved silhouettes that change colour, represents the city's determination to look to the future, but without forgetting its past. A past filled with tradition. Dan Brown is not the only person to have been captivated by what is considered one of the great buildings of our time. The Wachowskis, creators of The Matrix, used the museum and its surroundings as a setting in their futuristic film Jupiter Ascending in 2015, while in 1999 James Bond - played by Pierce Brosnan - leaps from a balcony with the building and its emblematic Puppy in the background.