Four years ago the little known Spanish city of Bilbao began a revolution in architecture that has stretched all the way to the Pacific. Not only is renowned architect Frank O. Gehry's design for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao visually astonishing, its cutting-edge computerized design forging an abstract castle of wavy titanium sheets. But the ensuing public ballyhoo, extolled from Madrid to Manilla, also sent a clear message to city leaders of every political stripe: If you build it they will come.

Gehry's Guggenheim gave Bilbao instant cultural clout. And if people spend a a bit of money at the gift shop and surrounding hotels, too, all the better. In the wake of this and London's Tate Modern museum, cities throughout the West have awakened to the notion that an architectural landmark can a renaissance to the region from which it rises.

In the first few years A.B. ("After Bilbao"), it's no surprise that the most common landmark in Western America's recent building boom have been museums. That said, all are not created equal-even when they come from the same person.

Without question, the most ballyhooed West Coast building of late is another museum designed by Gehry: the Experience Music Project. Nestled in Seattle Center, Gehry has said that "…this site generated a lot of freedom," to forge a building of unique architectural character. And that he did. The 140,000-square-foot EMP is a surreal wave of blue, red, gold, silver and purple metal, smooth as the shell of a jet plane but billowing forth like an acid flashback from the psychedelic days of rock that inspired the project.

"I think that EMP and projects like that certainly are visitor draws," says Dave Blandford of the Seattle-King County Visitors Bureau "We've seen a lot of leisure travelers coming because of this." But a year after the initial euphoria of its summer 2000 grand opening, will EMP continue to attract enough visitors to positively impact Seattle's economy? Says Blandford noncommittally, "Certainly we can say there's hope for that."

"Seattle is developing a critical mass of prestigious architecture," says Sheri Olson, an architecture critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and contributing editor for Architectural Record. "While there are always hard core architectural pilgrims that will go out of their way to visit a lone building, Puget Sound's cluster of avant garde projects will draw people with a more casual interest in design."

Meanwhile, two nearby cities hope to replicate Seattle's success. Just as Bilbao, Spain is not nearly as well known as Barcelona and Madrid, for over a century Bellevue and Tacoma have lurked in the shadow of their big sister. But as the Guggenheim suggests, the right art museum can do more than attract lovers of Van Gogh and Picasso: It can bring a city out of the shadows.

The award-winning new Bellevue Art Museum is a striking red brick anchor to the city's burgeoning cultural center, which for years has been virtually non-existent. "One of the special things about this particular project, a secret kind of joy I get," acclaimed architect Steven Holl, the museum's designer (and a native of the area), told the Seattle Times during its construction, "is working in a town I had criticized so heavily."

A few miles down Interstate 5 in Tacoma, still another art museum is seen as its city's cultural savior. Designed by noteworthy architect Antoine Predock, the Tacoma Art Museum broke ground in January 2001 with opening scheduled for 2003. TAM will provide a critical link connecting Tacoma's downtown with the Thea Foss Waterway development. "I think Tacoma's got plenty going for it," says Predock. "This building will add to that."

TAM is an angular, thin slice of building resting on a series of stilts. Whereas Gehry's Experience Music is surreal and garish, TAM is slender and smart. What's more, it will stride a fine line between catering to vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Drivers on the nearby I-705 freeway will be struck by its powerful presence. And with its streamlined, window-festooned design, inside and out patrons on foot will find, in Predock's words, "…a relentless focus on Mt. Ranier."

Of course no discussion of buildings and tourism would be complete without discussing Las Vegas. Until recently, however, the Nevada gambling Mecca and museums have been mutually exclusive. After all, going to a museum keeps tourists away from roulette and slot machines. But that philosophy has changed.

From elaborate recreations of New York, Paris, and Venice to the roller coasters and shopping malls comprising their gargantuan insides, in the 1990s and beyond Las Vegas has awakened to a full spectrum of entertainment opportunities that can augment gaming. Yet attractions for the more artistic and intellectual side of the populace has still been largely missing, save for a smattering of works on display at Steve Wynn's Bellagio Casino. But if Pritzker Prize-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has anything to say about it, Sin City could become the latest place to successfully pull off the great Bilbao experiment.

This fall will see the unveiling of not one but two art museums in Las Vegas operated by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. "The fact that [a Guggenheim museum] is based in Las Vegas is creating something of a stir," Foundation director Thomas Krens told the Las Vegas Review Journal. But, he argues, "nowhere do the rules say you can't come to Las Vegas."

One museum, to be aptly called Guggenheim Las Vegas, will occupy 63,700 feet of space, a size roughly equivalent to New York's Grand Central Station. Referred to informally as the "big box", it will sit adjacent to The Venetian casino, housing larger contemporary exhibitions and accommodating the art world's increasing penchant for work of larger scope. A smaller museum, dubbed the "jewel box", is a collaboration between the Guggenheim Foundation and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. It is situated in the front façade of The Venetian, between the hotel's valet entrance and front lobby. Known as the Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum Las Vegas, it will feature more classical exhibitions.

"It's very authentic, very real," says Rob Goldstein of the Venetian Hotel, about Koolhaas's design. "It's not another piece of Las Vegas faux-architecture. It's authentic architecture in its best representation."

According to Goldstein, the Guggenheim will accomplish several goals. First, it will help The Venetian complex attract more of the 35 million visitors who come to Las Vegas annually. Second, with works from the Hermitage making their first-ever states-side appearances, it will help bring art lovers uninterested in gambling to a city often called "Lost Wages". Finally, it will provide Las Vegas residents with the kind of cultural institution the city has lacked for so long. Says Goldstein, "It will be a catalyst for looking at this town in a different light. Las Vegas is ready for diversification."

The creations of Koolhaas, Holl, Predock and Gehry not withstanding, one of the West's most impressive newer art museums predates all of their work. Opened in 1995, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) has quickly become the crux of the city's burgeoning South of Market (SOMA) district, anchoring the Yerba Buena arts and entertainment redevelopment around the Moscone Convention Center.

Designed by Swiss-Italian architect Mario Botta, SFMOMA features a postmodern brick façade with a striped white cylindrical atrium rising from its center. Subtler than its sister West Coast museums constructed afterward, SFMOMA is nevertheless an instant landmark in a city already full of them.

And in two other cities, renovations of historic older art museums have increased gallery space and updated exhibition capacity for the 21st Century. Originally built in 1959, The Phoenix Art Museum expanded its space in 1996 without compromising architectural integrity. In fact, the new enlarged space by Tod Williams, Billie Tsien and Associates, achieved a wonderfully seamless connection with Arizona's desert environment not seen in the original modernist structure.

In 2000 the Portland Art Museum underwent a major expansion of its own. The building was originally designed by legendary architect Pietro Belluschi. Belluschi's Portland Art Museum is a graceful and subtly designed modernist building that is already using its newly expanded space to originate and host a great amount of traveling exhibitions.

True, expanding a pre-existing site is never as attention-grabbing as a new venture, particularly from a talented architect at the top of his game. But as Portland State University urban studies professor Carl Abbott notes, river cities like Phoenix and Portland tend to show "...a relaxed confidence and smugness about their superiority of life," while seaport cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles tend to "...worry about trends and styles." Perhaps it's no surprise, therefore, to see which cities' museums make grand statements and which ones reinforce what's already there. But as the Rose City and its desert companion in Arizona prove, time-tested history is often worth preserving as much or more than riskier new ventures.

While America's museums routinely attract many thousands of visitors each year, for sheer popularity nothing can ever rival our diamonds, gridirons and hardwood. For better or worse, we are a nation in love with sports. Perhaps more than any other time in history, America has been on a sports-building binge. And not only have we simply been constructing football fields, baseball diamonds and basketball/hockey arenas, but increasingly they can be found among the downtown cores of our cities.

In 1998 baseball's Arizona Diamondbacks christened Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix. 1999 saw the opening of Safeco Field, a new home for the Seattle Mariners. A few months later, basketball's Los Angeles Lakers moved from crime-ridden Inglewood to the new Staples Center downtown. Last year the San Francisco Giants finally left Candlestick Park for Pacific Bell Park, a stone's throw from the Bay Bridge and, incidentally, the only major league park built without government assistance.

Now, at least two more stadiums are on the way. In Seattle, where the Kingdome has already been demolished, the NFL's Seahawks await a football-only complex to be erected in its place. The Kingdome already commanded prime downtown Seattle real estate, but even after little more than two decades the gargantuan cement construction was showing its age. The Seahawks' new home-not yet christened with a corporate sponsor's name-will hold up to 72,000 fans beneath a retractable roof that will allow football to be outside, where everyone feels it belongs, without soaking the faithful in inevitable Northwest drizzle.

Never a city content to be lost in the fray, San Diego is tossing its cap into the sports building boom. But perhaps what's more noteworthy is that the structure will mark a new era in stadium design. Ever since Baltimore's Camden Yards tantalized fans with its vintage design, evoking the sport's rich history, all of the baseball parks to follow have featured similar throwback architecture, from brick façades right down to manual scoreboards. But San Diego's ballpark, boasts a look all its own that embraces the future without forgetting the past. "It was very important that it not rely on [vintage] style as a crutch," says Antoine Predock, the stadium's designer. "It is its own building."

Set to open for the 2003 season, San Diego's ballpark features a pristine modernist style with elaborate surrounding gardens designed to link with the surrounding Gaslamp Quarter. "It will be quite different from other recent ballparks," says San Diego Padres President and CEO Larry Lucchino. "We will have blue seats and white steel that evoke water and sunny skies, with architecture, materials, garden-like landscaping and open, airy concourses that reflect the San Diego spirit and lifestyle."

Not only is Predock's plan a bold departure from the vintage baseball architectural trend, but as Architecture Magazine wrote, the architect has "…put the park back in 'ballpark' with his design." And as San Diego Padres' real estate consultant Glenn Shannon noted upon the stadium's groundbreaking, "If you get 40,000 people to a Tuesday night game and even 5 percent go over to the Gaslamp, that's a huge new source of business for bars, restaurants and retailers."

"Year around, people will be able to walk the entire perimeter of the Ballpark on a continuous path," continues Lucchino. "Our goal is to build a beautiful ballpark that is fully integrated into a redeveloped neighborhood that completes the renaissance of downtown San Diego."

One thing that's quickly evident in today's landmark building boom is that the same names keep cropping up again and again. So just in case you can't make it to Seattle's EMP or Bilbao's Guggenheim, Frank Gehry is also designing a landmark for his hometown of Los Angeles. Scheduled to open in 2003, Gehry's Disney Concert Hall is another billowing metal reverie, this time evoking the sails of a pleasure boat in the nearby Pacific.

"It is unusual for a building to achieve status as an icon before it is built," writes Gloria Koenig in her new book, Iconic L.A., "but the Disney Concert Hall has occupied the center of attention since it left the drawing board. Beginning construction ten years after it was designed, the stainless steel 'sails' of Frank O. Gehry's concert hall embody the spirit, exuberance and place that is Los Angeles."

It seems Gehry's unofficial partner in the redesigning of America-perhaps the only architect in the world of comparable acclaim-is Rem Koolhaas. And of all the noteworthy architecture to rise in Seattle within this amazing building cycle, including Gehry's EMP, the most striking may be Koolhaas' new Seattle Public Library. A 355,000-square-foot, ten-story project currently under construction, the building is also scheduled to open in 2003. Although libraries aren't traditionally tourist attractions, anyone within a 50-mile radius of the Emerald City will be compelled to visit this astonishing site upon its completion.

Consisting of a series of "floating boxes", the building is an angular maze of copper, steel and glass, including a four-story spiral of bookshelves and cavernous public spaces. Viewed from any angle, the Seattle Library is a masterpiece in the making. Even if you prefer to buy books rather than borrow, be sure to check it out. "Move over Space Needle, the new Central Library is going to be Seattle's next architectural icon," says Olson. "Rem Koolhaas' sexy yet enigmatic design will be a hot destination even if you don't have a library card."

As the white-hot economic boom cools, it remains to be seen whether the West's architectural renaissance will continue. But even if it does, it seems that Bilbao lesson-that great architecture can enliven the world-will continue to be learned beyond a single era. "Great architecture has always done that," says Predock, "from Chartres Cathedral to the Pantheon in Rome. Architecture that is important and appropriate and authentic always draws people. I don't think that's anything new. But I think right now in this country there's a higher level of expectation on civic projects. The bar has been raised."