In 1996, before the Bilbao Guggenheim was even complete, Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft and a Jimi Hendrix fan, commissioned Gehry to design a rock-and-roll museum and performance venue in Seattle called the Experience Music Project. On seeing the titanium artichoke, other cities have been saying, 'We want one of those.' According to the Financial Times, in its first three years the museum has helped to generate about $500 million in economic activity and about $100 million in new taxes. Today's public definitely knows about the Bilbao Guggenheim since its opening, in 1997, it has attracted almost five million visitors. Buildings by modern architects were objects of veneration for students, but they were not paid much attention by the public. People did go out of their way to visit buildings, but they were usually ancient works of art like Chartres Cathedral, or historical monuments like the Tower of London. Yet his was hardly a household name most Americans, pressed to identify a contemporary architect, would probably have named Frank Lloyd Wright, who had been dead for five years. Corbu, as we called him, was one of the most important architects in the world. Most, judging by their cameras and sketchbooks, were architectural-not religious-pilgrims, students like myself. When I went to Ronchamp, in 1964, there were few other visitors. With its ballooning shapes and titanium swirls, its colliding forms and unusual spaces, it has been described variously as a 'postrationalist vision,' an 'inter-galactic spaceship,' and a 'titanium artichoke.' There is a major difference, however, between the museum and the chapel.

Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim is equally iconoclastic. After Ronchamp modern architecture was never quite the same.įrank O. These sculptural features challenged the functionalist dogma-to a large extent devised by the architect himself-of the white-shoebox International Style. The building had curved, roughly plastered concrete walls and a swelling roof that resembled a nun's wimple. In 1955 Le Corbusier built the chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp, a remote site in the Jura Mountains near the Swiss border.

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