Wild Thing

SEATTLE —  For those who yearn for the next Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Frank Gehry’s new Experience Music Project building may be a bit of a disappointment. Bilbao not only put a sleepy industrial backwater on the world cultural map, its ecstatic forms seemed to capture the essence of creative turmoil. The EMP rock ‘n’ roll museum, on the other hand, is more defiant--a big, unruly psychedelic experiment. But it is just that lack of polish that makes it such a hypnotic building. Ultimately, it may be seen as a more radical statement about the future of architecture.

Built at a cost of $100 million, the museum was conceived by Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who left the firm in 1983 to pursue more personal passions. A devout Jimi Hendrix fan, Allen wanted a museum that would not only house exhibits on the history of rock ‘n’ roll, but would embody the energy of rock music. To that end, the museum includes a myriad of interactive exhibits where would-be rock stars can unleash their garage-band fantasies.

Gehry must have seemed an obvious choice for such a project. He has now designed 10 museums. Bilbao, his last, was an acknowledged masterpiece even before its completion in 1997. And what better architect for a rock museum than Gehry, whose delirious forms seem to sum up rock’s anarchic bent?

Yet once Allen hired Gehry, he placed severe restrictions on the architect’s input. Gehry was not allowed to design any of the museum’s exhibition spaces, only its exterior shell and public gathering places--the cafe, bar and bookstore. What’s more, when design began, museum officials had little idea of what the exhibits would include, making the task that much more undefined.

Gehry’s response was to design the world’s most surreal warehouse--a great, gaping shed whose intent was to capture the frenzied energy of rock’s counterculture aura. Set at the edge of Seattle Center--the rambling ‘60s-era park dominated by the Space Needle--the structure has a toughness that Gehry has rarely attained in his most recent, increasingly sculptural buildings. The museum, in fact, is strongest when it is most raw, and if it is a flawed masterpiece, this is only due to a few moments of fussiness that detract from the initial magic.

The structure is loosely composed of five amorphous forms, all compressed into one organic mass and each clad in a different color: silver, gold, purple, baby blue and lipstick red. The park’s monorail tracks swoop by to the east. A rickety old amusement park abuts the site to the south. Seen through the looping tracks of the park’s roller coaster, the metallic purple wall that dominates the park-side facade--framed by blocks of silver and blue--looks like the backdrop to a psychedelic dream. Its huge, blank reflective surface, which swells out toward the landscape, is strangely anonymous, as if it were struggling to contain the rebellious energy trapped inside.

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As you circle the museum, the forms become more fractured. The baby blue exterior of the museum’s motion-platform ride--the Artist’s Journey--lifts up to wrap around the monorail tracks, folding over them like a crumpled blanket. Light spills through its tunnel-like form, flickering across its surfaces. A rough concrete cylinder--the staff entry--anchors the corner, echoing the crude concrete of the tracks. At other points, the building’s exterior skin peels up like soft drapery, luring you inside. It is an apt image for a rock museum: The forms themselves are an act of rebellion; they imply a woozy reality, a trip into the dark unconscious.

The design only suffers in some of the details. On 5th Avenue, for instance, a row of faux “windows” lines the gold exterior that bulges out over the street. The cutouts are the result of a city ordinance that mandates a window every 30 feet to combat dullness. Here, that notion seems ludicrous. The cutouts only scar the sleek beauty of the golden form, as if some bureaucrat was bent on reasserting some recognizable order here. (Gehry had proposed simply plastering the building with concert posters, a wonderful touch, but the city rejected that idea.)

Another problem may be in the play of colors and forms along this facade. The forms twist and contort to adapt to the scale of the street, shifting in color from gold to red to silver. Above, a collage of wires and cascading glass panels spills down from the roof in a gesture that recalls the broken strings of a guitar. But the blue and red enamel lacks the wonderful richness of the metallic surfaces. The red, in particular, verges on kitsch, while the flamboyance of its form--which curls up to create a street-front entry--combined with the cascading glass, seems too literal, a cartoon image of the rock experience.

But this is nit-picking. Once you enter the building, you are sucked up into a remarkable swirl of energy. The building is divided into two zones, set on either side of a stair that cascades down from the upper lobby to the bookstore and cafe below. A bar overlooks the stair on one side, with the exhibition spaces on the other, hidden behind a long undulating steel wall. In effect, the stairway becomes an internal canyon, funneling the public life of the park right through the building.

None of that, however, prepares you for the emotional power of this space. The gigantic wavy wall seems to unfurl along the stair, eventually curling behind the bookstore and connecting to a second entry to the galleries. Patched together out of panels of perforated steel, with blotches of blue and yellow paint, it suggests a great psychological line, between the free-flowing, spontaneous world of the imagination and a more repressed, rational existence.

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That world is left intentionally raw and unformed. There is no pretense of refinement here. Up above, the roof’s structure is completely exposed, its bent, structural I-beams roughly welded together, the undulating concrete surface a dull gray. To emphasize the point, big plywood crates, stacked on top of each other, are scattered throughout the bookshop, as if they’d been randomly dropped off a forklift. They are a work of art in their own right.

There are other spectacular moments here--the eye-shaped concrete stair that swirls down from the upstairs bar to the cafe, the wavy plywood canopy over the bar that recalls the work of the late Finnish Modernist Alvar Aalto. As for the exhibition rooms--designed by a variety of firms--the less said the better. Crammed with rock memorabilia, their appearance owes more to theme restaurants like the Hard Rock Cafe than to a thoughtful effort to present rock’s tumultuous history inside the walls of a museum. Even the interactive displays, where you can strum on a guitar or wail away on a drum set, seem like they were lifted from a theme park.

But the building will survive the exhibits. The Experience Music Project is proof that Gehry is cautiously beginning to reinvent himself once again. His Bilbao Guggenheim may be a more perfect building, but it can also be seen as the culmination of a decade’s worth of experimentation. Its flamboyant sculptural forms are rooted in an almost classical regard for how to order space. Each room reflects a careful analysis of its function, from the conventional galleries to the grand central atrium.

Here, to a degree at least, Gehry was forced to abandon that strategy. The vagueness of the program meant that he often only had aesthetic considerations to guide him, the urge to test the effect that space, color and form has on the body and mind. Form and function are casually divorced. Seattle might be seen as yet another turning point in Gehry’s work. It tells us that, at 72, Gehry is more willing to take risks than many younger talents working today.