But EMP has higher ambitions yet. An October 1997 press release promises that the (separately ticketed) "Artist's Journey" exhibit will offer "a staged, 'ride-like' experience, immersing 125 music lovers per 'performance' in a powerful visual and auditory experience, following the 'path' taken by many of the music world's greatest artists." If there were any doubt of the direction intended with "The Artist's Journey," it's resolved by the choice of company to develop the show: Digital Domain of Venice, California, creator of "Terminator 2—3-D"for Universal Studios' Florida theme park.
But, in line with Allen's roots in the computer world, even the more down-to-earth "exhibits" at EMP are planned to be "interactive" to a degree that will push the state of that art to its limits. With collections and exhibition plans still evolving, the Gehry firm has essentially been restricted to creating the external shell of the building, bringing a separate team of designers to shape the interior of the building, a team headed by Ann Farrington, who comes to EMP from similar jobs in the Washington, DC, area at the "Newseum" of media and the United States Holocaust Museum.
Given the novelty of the multimedia ambitions at EMP, this you-take-care-of-the-outside-and-let-us-do-the-inside approach may have been inevitable. But it also means that an architect as noted for his museum installations as his museums, a designer used to having his say about everything from the taps on the water fountains to the finish on the roof tiles, has had to content himself with designing a shell for someone else's oyster.
This restraint may have affected the evolution of Gehry's design, for a certain tentative quality in its very extravagance. The most recent 3-D version of the complex revealed to the public, while still idiosyncratic as hell, looks somehow less distinct than earlier renditions. As one acute local architectural eye observes: "It looks like between model no. 1 and no. 2, someone came along with a pin and let the air out."
Despite the awkward look of the models presented so far, it's far too soon to conclude that EMP is going to be just another near-miss on Seattle's comfortably second-rate skyline. Part of the problem with the photos we've seen is the fact that nearly all are of the "back" of the building on Fifth Avenue. The "front," as conceived by Gehry, is actually hardly visible from Fifth; it's the more or less rectangular purple unit facing into the Seattle Center and Fun Forest, around which the other forms flow and clump. Called the "Sky Museum" and housing both an auditorium/concert hall and the core collections of Jimiana, the unit is planned to allow the addition of a wall-to-wall and ground-to-roofline multimedia display to rival those seen on Tokyo's ginza.
Another reason to suspend judgment is that Frank Gehry's success rate is as high as that of any living architect: a remarkable achievement considering his wholly intuitive approach to design and unwillingness to repeat himself. His design for EMP is not only right on the boundary of the doable in contemporary construction technology. It's also right on the verge of the seeable. Until we can look at the finished building, we literally can't know if we're in the presence of an honorably failed experiment or catching a first glimpse of the architecture of the next millennium.
Meantime, it's useful in trying to get one's mind around EMP to forget the often quoted comparison to a smashed electric guitar. Think of it instead not in isolation but in relation to its immediate surroundings, cheek by jowl with the Fun Forest, its lineaments as consciously crafted to be seen from the top of the Space Needle and the Seattle Freeway as well as from prosaic Fifth Avenue, its structure gashed open to afford monorail riders a glimpse of its guts as they arrive at the center.
Amusement parks of long ago invariably featured what the carny trade calls "a dark ride." Usually housed in an ungainly, mysterious, garishly painted structure, the Magic Mountain or Sutter's Mine or Spookhouse promised patrons a journey full of bumps, reverses, and surprises. With any luck, EMP will offer its patrons at least that much, and possibly a great deal more.
Related Links:
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao page
http://www.bm30.es/proyectos/gugge_uk.html
Disney Hall
http://www.disneyhall.org/
Experience Music Project
http://www.experience.org/
A rival Jimi Hendrix homepage
http://www.jimi-hendrix.com/
Volume5
http://www.volume5.com/index.html
Paul Allen's home page
http://www.paulallen.com/
