Word: bilbao
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...glass Parthenon, like Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin, or an elaborately "timeless" spatial event, like Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It is not an operatic signature building, like Frank Gehry's titanium-sheathed meganautilus in Bilbao, Spain. Still less is it a feat of conspicuously externalized luxury, like Richard Meier's Getty Center, poised in marble aloofness above Los Angeles...
...always mentally ducking," he says now. "People would yell at me and say, 'You can't do that.'" Nobody says no to Gehry anymore, certainly not since the triumph three years ago of his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. His hurtling design there was certified at once as "the most important building of our time" by Philip Johnson, the very gray eminence of American architects. It may also be the most purely delightful. With its improbable towers tilting against themselves and its titanium sheathing in full refulgent glow, it brings on a question that the world has not enjoyed asking...
...Guggenheim has also flooded tourists into Bilbao, provided backup curves in a Mariah Carey video and was featured in the most recent James Bond film. What this means is that Gehry has managed to be both intellectually respectable and popular, not just populist, a balancing act that makes his tilted towers look easy. Richard Meier is the great American architect whose stately modernist buildings, most of them in a white so ideal it could be used for the table settings at Plato's Symposium, are the very opposite of Gehry's Baroque tumblings. Yet even Meier is happy about...
...could say that about the Experience Music Project, Gehry's first major public building to open in the U.S. since he did Bilbao. Located at the foot of that beloved American knickknack, the Seattle Space Needle, the EMP is an "interactive" rock museum costing $240 million (more than $100 million for Gehry's building, the rest for the museum installed within it). The money comes by way of Paul Allen, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder, who has his own rock band, a lifelong thing for Seattle native Jimi Hendrix and enough cash to indulge his pleasures...
...everywhere, and it put him on the map of cutting-edge architects. Not long after, he decided to follow his bliss and do only the kind of work he wanted. He cut his office from 30 workers to three and started over. That was the road that led to Bilbao, Seattle and points farther...