The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, as a result of the reflection on its own working and with a sensitive attitude towards the evolution of the public twenty-five years after the inauguration, has identified the convenience of assigning certain spaces to informal activities for the spontaneous approach of visitors to art and to the institution. Spaces for resting, learning and creating which here are identified as ‘socializing creative spaces’.

As an initial phase of the work, we carried out an exhaustive analysis of the museum spaces. The interstices of the itineraries around galleries are seen as opportunities to offer an inclusive support to visitors for rest, play and learn. In coherence with the essence of the museum, its architecture and the free approach that the visitors live in their itineraries, these socializing spaces are proposed hybrid.  These blurred limits between the definitions of playing and learning, resting and entertaining, also respond to the diversity of the public.

The materialization of the hybrid ‘socializing creative spaces’ we proposed is associated with the playful display of the folies from the eighteen-century gardens.

This interest in the folie, beyond the specific formal archetype, is found in its condition as a family: as a set of singularities that, in addition to its functional value, that due to its arrangement, succession and scale endorses the articulation of the garden, enriching the routes and enhancing it’s use and enjoyment. When the visitor comes across a folie, the scale is altered and thus this perceptive distortion makes it possible to reorient the route within the broader and overall context of the whole-garden.

From this approach, we have worked on the development of multiple units for various spaces identified as optimal for meeting within the museum open circulation.