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But there was another structure Gehry wanted to refer to--the mother ship, as it were: Frank Lloyd Wright's original Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue, with its great empty center wound about by the spiral of exhibition ramp. Obviously that couldn't be repeated (it is, in any case, a curator's nightmare), but like the Bilbaino industrial metaphor, it could be evoked.
One walks down a long flight of steps into the museum, and then the atrium rises--or rather, soars: a large ceremonial space with catwalks and walkways, branching off into galleries at its several levels. In it, the three surface types of the museum's construction can be taken in: white Sheetrock, plate glass hung on steel members with exaggerated joints and flanges, and titanium skin. (The titanium sounds like an extravagance, but wasn't. Gehry was able to lock up enough of it to cover the museum when the Russians, in 1993, started dumping their stocks of the normally ultraexpensive metal on the market.) Their forms swelling and deflating in a strongly rhythmical way, large trunks of glass, plaster and titanium rise to the top of the five-story structure; they house utilities, a stair and an elevator.
The intensity Gehry can give to a vertical space also transfers to the horizontal ones. The biggest gallery, known as "the Boat," is 1 1/4 times the length of a football field (450 ft.), but with its curved walls and round ceiling trusses, it hasn't a foot of dull space in it. There are a few things in the design that seem arbitrary or merely rhetorical. The towering "parasol" that Gehry put over the river entrance is pointless except as a visual element--its roof is too high to give any protection from the weather. And the twin stone-veneer towers that rise downstream of the La Salve bridge are just a costly logo.
These are quibbles compared with Gehry's achievement in this museum. It's a building that spells the end of the smarty-boots, smirkingly facile historicism on which so much Postmodernist building was based--a quoted capital here, an ironic reference there. It isn't afraid of metaphor, but it insists that the essence of building is structure and placemaking. It confronts the rethinking of structure and the formation of space with an impetuous, eccentric confidence. No "school of Gehry" will come out of it, any more than there could have been a "school" of Barcelona's Antonio Gaudi. His work is imitation-proof, but liberating.