Even after 10 years, I never tire of visiting the Guggenheim in Bilbao. No matter what business takes me to the city, I find myself cutting interviews short, cancelling appointments – making any excuse, in fact – to spend a few hours with the museum. I say with, rather than in, because Frank Gehry’s building is a thing of such arresting beauty I need to admire it from every angle before stepping inside. I think of it as a caravel that is straining to break its moorings, its titanium-clad sails already billowing in the wind. Dazzling in the sunshine, it is equally mesmerising beneath Bilbao’s (more frequent) leaden skies, when it camouflages itself in steely greys.

But there are more reasons to admire Gehry’s masterpiece. The city’s economic renaissance has been so dramatic since the opening of the Bilbao Guggenheim in 1997 that the museum has become an icon of what architecture can do for a city in decline. No one doubts that the Guggenheim put Bilbao on the world map. Before the project was conceived, the port city was dying. Its shipyards and steel mills had been closed, one in five workers was unemployed and Basque separatists were terrorising the region. The city’s budget was modest and there were many competing priorities: worker-retraining programmes, tax breaks to attract new businesses, hospitals and schools. How could the regional council justify spending €84m on a modern art museum?