Gehry Cranks It Up : Architect’s Vision for Seattle Museum of Rock ‘n’ Roll Melds Odd Forms With a Liberating Spirit of Purpose

Slouched in a squat cardboard armchair in his Santa Monica office, Frank Gehry is peering into his own future. Across the room, a colleague tapes sheet after sheet of gold paper onto an enormous, unwieldly model as the 68-year-old architect ponders his work.

For Gehry, it is a familiar process. Despite the intrusion of ever-more sophisticated computer software, Gehry still shapes things with his hands. But if his methods are fixed, the work is not.

The model is the latest version of Seattle’s $60-million Experience Music Project--an interactive museum dedicated to the local rock ‘n’ roll scene, scheduled to begin construction this month.

Inspired by the adolescent dreams of Paul Allen--Microsoft co-founder, owner of the Portland Trailblazers and Jimi Hendrix groupie--the design for the 110,000-square-foot museum on Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair grounds evokes a giant smashed guitar: a Hendrix Stratocaster on a heroic scale, splintered at the foot of the Space Needle. (The guitarist was born in Seattle.)

The project’s organic look is a radical departure from both the more detached geometric forms of Gehry’s distant past and the more free-flowing designs of recent years. Free of rigid barriers and geometric regularity, EMP is something strikingly new.

But the design also encapsulates Gehry’s career-long obsession with juxtaposing forms. Early on, he created buildings by placing discrete objects next to each other--houses where almost every room was designed first as a separate structure. That evolved into more compressed sculptural works, like his much-touted Guggenheim Museum branch in Bilbao, Spain. Now Gehry seems to be reversing the process--he’s tearing buildings apart again.

From the start, the in-between spaces--the voids that bind and separate objects--concerned Gehry as much as the objects themselves. In one early masterpiece, the 1989 Schnabel house in Brentwood, juxtaposition yields magical spaces, where inhabitants slip gently back and forth between a lighthearted intimacy and monk-like solitude.

But the shift away from fragmented forms complicated the problem of how to handle interior movement. The 1990 American Center in Paris, for example, is an elegantly clad building that doesn’t hold together once inside. Different functions--dance room, theater, galleries--seem to spin off into random, disconnected worlds.

EMP is Gehry’s latest attempt to grapple with these issues. Its basic plan has not changed since its earliest incarnation, when the project was first made public in October 1996. The building is anchored by a giant foyer--a towering 65-foot-high cube. The cube’s blank facade--which will be used as a video screen and backdrop for outdoor concerts--visually stabilizes the structure. The image is reminiscent of La Tourette--Le Corbusier’s brilliant monastery on the outskirts of Lyon, France. There, pilgrims approach past an enormous blank wall, what architectural historian Colin Rowe described as “a great dam holding back a reservoir of spiritual energy.” At EMP, the effect is not meditative but ecstatic.

The rest of the building curls around this central cube. Its swooping forms are divided into three main spaces: a restaurant/bar/nightclub; an exhibition space containing galleries, a theater and a bookstore; and “Digital Domain”--an interactive film-based ride with a 200-seat “motion platform.” Although visitors enter via the foyer, the front door isn’t obvious. A promenade snakes between the restaurant and the foyer’s cube; one must follow that path to find the way in. On the other side of the building, the Seattle Monorail actually cleaves the exhibition spaces from the ride, crossing between the structures at the second-story level.

While this basic diagram has remained the same, Gehry’s models show that other relationships between the spaces have gone through a series of revisions. In the earliest scheme, Gehry seems to revert to his old way of working, huddling together discrete, odd-shaped forms, each lacquered in the colors of hip electric guitars--Daphne Blue or Les Paul Gold. The exhibition spaces, for instance, were made up of clearly contrasting forms.

Tinkering with that version, Gehry stumbled into the unknown. For version two, he began to layer the forms one on top of the other, until he had shaped a more sleek and cohesive--and more dynamic--composition. The theater, galleries and bookshop area were re-formed to bind the composition together, becoming one swoop bracketed by the ride and restaurant spaces. Above, the roof is a clutter of shimmering metal--with wires running across the top like the broken strings on a electric guitar. It is as if Gehry were trying to unify our atomized world.

Inside both versions, Gehry struggled to create fluid movement through the structures. The Monorail and promenade carve open the building, creating great chasms between powerful forms. Once in the foyer, that sense of cutting through space continues. Visitors can follow several looping paths; they can slip under the Monorail tracks, into “Digital Domain” and through it into the exhibition space, or walk under a towering mock Wurlitzer jukebox facade up a swirling stairway directly into the main gallery.

Allen, however, was disappointed with the second model, preferring the more fragmented exterior of the first version. Further, the exhibit designers, who entered the process at this point, clamored for darker and more static spaces to house their shows. The fluid looping circulation, they thought, would make it difficult for visitors to stop to look at their exhibits.

In the current model, Gehry has melded the two schemes. The nearly final version is more visually cohesive than Model One, yet more fragmented than Model Two. The galleries again look like multiple structures, and the forms feel more separate. Visitors can no longer pass from the ride into the galleries. Now, all the routes turn back to the central foyer. To create yet another discrete space for one of the collection’s major sculptures, the gallery stair was pushed back into a secondary foyer.

The current interior solution is good for the exhibits, bad for flow. It is still a matter of dispute between the architect and the exhibit designers.

Meanwhile, the slickly lacquered guitar-like surfaces of the earlier design were replaced with large painted metal plates modeled after an airplane’s skin. One is reminded of sculptor Richard Serra’s romance with the giant shipyards where his father was a welder. But this is not modernist nostalgia for the Industrial Age. Gehry is less atavistic: He is playfully tossing in references to our everyday experience.

Gehry’s work has long been radically experimental. But his willingness to splinter apart EMP’s forms suggest a new openness, an explosive freedom. It is an apt metaphor for a building that memorializes Hendrix. If Gehry once fashioned work that seemed to suggest a thoughtful connection between us, his most recent creation is about unchaining the spirit. It is a wonderfully liberated dream.