While debugging a NURBS panelizer this morning (chasing a 0.5 mm tolerance mismatch from an old CATIA export), I started wondering: was the Guggenheim Bilbao actually the first major building to lean on CATIA/NURBS workflows, or is there an earlier precedent I should cite in our docs?
No - Bilbao is the poster child, but not the first; Gehry used CATIA on the 1992 Barcelona Fish to drive rib geometry, and Mark Burry’s team was applying CATIA/NURBS to Sagrada Família stonework in the early ’90s. If you want a pre-Bilbao building cite, Renzo Piano’s Kansai Airport terminal (1994) is often referenced for aerospace-grade NURBS modeling of its roof.