HOW CULTURAL CACHET CAN REINVENT A DESTINATION

BILBAO

When Bilbao asked Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry to design an art gallery for the post-industrial Spanish city, he said the pitch was: “Mr Gehry, we need the Sydney Opera House.

Our town is dying.”

Gehry’s voluptuous titanium and glass Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (right, guggenheimbilbao.eus; admission £11), which opened in 1997, led to what became known as “the Bilbao effect” – in which cultural investment and dazzling architecture leads to economic revival.

It worked: according to a Harvard study, the city’s per capita GDP more than doubled between 1996 and 2015.

But elsewhere, the alchemy has proved elusive. That, say researchers, is because Gehry’s gallery was the product of a wider and more complex system of public investment and coordinated effort by civic planners and leaders. Extravagant architecture alone is not enough.

ABU DHABI

The Emirates capital was in search of global cultural cache when it reached a £425 million deal with the French government in 2007.

That bought the rights to the Louvre name – one of the world’s oldest and largest galleries – for 30.5 years, and loans of its art from Paris for 15 years.

Ten years later, Louvre Abu Dhabi (louvreabudhabi. ae; admission £14) opened off the coast of the city on Saadiyat Island. Architect Jean Nouvel’s low-slung dome looks rather like metallic lace; the holes in its roof are designed to allow a “rain of light” to illuminate its interior.

Louvre Abu Dhabi’s focus is traditional art, a meeting of Asian treasures with Western masterpieces. It says two million people visited in its first two years.

WEIL AM RHEIN A little-known private gallery in southern Germany, the Vitra Design Museum (design-museum. de; admission £11) is part of the eponymous furniture company’s sprawling manufacturing campus near the Swiss border.

It is entertaining, rather like an architectural zoo, and visitors are encouraged to wander about.

The original museum building, designed by Gehry in 1989, is a wilfully wacky tangle. It sits alongside a collection of factories, among them two designed by Nicholas Grimshaw in the early 1980s, another by Gehry in 1989 and another by Sanaa in 2012. There is a show house by Herzog & de Meuron and a jokey fire station by Zaha Hadid.

Vitra wants to be a world-leading institution for architecture and design. Its storage basement holds one of the largest collections of modernist furniture in the world, though it is out of reach of visitors.

But its public exhibition programme is thoughtful and original. Many of its shows travel around the world. The Surrealism and Design exhibition at London’s Design Museum, for example, started here.