Experience This!

Seattle is a fine city in many ways; but nobody ever made a special trip here for our climate or our architecture. Until recently, much the same was true of Bilbao, the roughly Seattle-sized seaport on Spain's stormy North Atlantic coast. But all that changed as architect Frank O. Gehry's eye-dazzling, brain-warping Guggenheim Museum Bilbao began to rise along the town's shabby, workaday waterfront.

Could something similar happen in Seattle? Already ground has been broken for another design by the Canadian-born, California-bred architect whom critic Charles Jencks calls "probably the number-two architect in the world (the first place being permanently unoccupied)." Sometime in the summer of 1999, a $60 million multimedia museum of rock 'n' roll financed entirely by former Microsoft mogul Paul Allen is due to open along Fifth Avenue between Broad and Mercer, on a streetscape distinguished for the last 30-odd years by Metro bus barns and the Wild Mouse ride.

Thanks in equal measure to Frank Lloyd Wright's genius for self-promotion and to Ayn Rand's paean to individual creativity in The Fountainhead, we tend to think of architects as lonely visionaries, locked in constant battle on any project bigger than a beachhouse with the pigheaded conservatism of clients. This pretty fantasy ignores the fact that the client provides the architect with more than money.

Without the client's needs, desires, and personality, there's nothing to suggest what direction to take with a design, nothing to spark the architect's imagination and ingenuity. It's not too much to say that every great design is a hybrid: a creative, sometimes conflicted collaboration between two psyches, those of architect and client. The Experience Music Project, as it's now called, is a good, even extreme, example of that rule, because in designing it the architect had not one but two clients to satisfy.

The client who's attracted most attention to date, naturally, is Allen himself, with a net worth of around $8 billion the third-richest individual in America, according to BusinessWeek. But the individual calling most of the shots on the EMP is Allen's sister Jody Patton, director of the family charitable foundation. It was Paul Allen's interest in rock 'n' roll collectibles that sowed the seeds for EMP, but it was Patton who developed the idea from modest-storefront to megamuseum scale, she who developed the program for its exhibits, she who chose the designer to provide her concepts with a material frame.

There's a certain justice in the fact that the EMP may well go down in history as the first major structure ever designed almost from its conception to final parts fabrication entirely with a computer—though far from one of the modest microcomputers that made Allen's fortune. There's a certain irony, too; because the architect who created the free-form computer-graphic bulges and furrows of the EMP is also the architect who was and remains so computer-shy that until recently he would not allow so much as a word processor into his office.

You'd never know it to look at the EMP, or any of Gehry's other recent designs. A member of no school, paying tribute to no tradition, Gehry, who turned 69 last week, may have grown up in the modernist era with its devotion to values like simplicity, practicality, economy, and context, but he tosses one shibboleth of 20th-century design—"Form follows function"—right out the window. His Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a showcase of contemporary art, but it looks like a luxury liner from an art deco tourist poster, docked beside an oil refinery that's died and gone to heaven. His Disney Hall, soon to be a building in Los Angeles, is the new home of the LA Philharmonic: It looks, somehow, like a swirling stone Valentine bouquet to the city.

Both of those designs seem conventional compared to the Experience Music Project for Seattle. Its forms—five billowing multicolored techo-morphs clustering around a bulging asymmetrical breadbox core—are literally hard to see in photographs, and even in three-dimensional models, where the eye slides right off their complex, recurved surfaces, and the brain has a hard time interpreting their scale, in spite of toy cars and stick figures dotted round the base. Until EMP's exterior is finished next spring, its curved aluminum, copper, and steel fish scales reflecting Seattle's ever-changing, filtered oyster light, we won't really be able to experience its soaring, swooping outline to the full—or be certain whether we possess the first great public structure of the 21st century or a gigantic successor to the Queen Anne Blob.

In the meantime we can get familiar with where the piece comes from, spiritually and historically. Unlike many architects, Frank Gehry is both articulate and down to earth, never unwilling to explain to anyone who asks exactly what he's up to. But the best explanations of Gehry's vision are his buildings themselves, buildings as various as a simple storefront, a college campus, and a millionaire's hideaway. And to see them in all their astonishing variety and mysterious unity, all one needs is a free day, a rental car, and a plane ticket to Los Angeles.