1 THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO The first great building of the 21st century has turned up a few years early. In the unspectacular Spanish Basque city of Bilbao, architect Frank Gehry has deposited a branch of New York City's Guggenheim Museum of Art that is a tribute to the power of that great contemporary idea, "Stop making sense." Beneath the cocked hats of its undulating towers, the most delightful architectural mind of our time has been everywhere at work. Without stooping to the twee historical quotation of so much postmodern design, Gehry has repudiated Modernist sanctity, symmetry and right-angled geometries in his own fearless way, taking them apart and putting them back together with a rollicking, cockeyed brilliance. Then he dressed this curvaceous beauty in shimmering titanium that is both sexy and unmistakably elegant. (And talk about pounding swords into art galleries: four years ago, on the cheap, Gehry picked up loads of this pricey "strategic" metal when the Russians started dumping their stockpiles.) With this strange masterpiece, a Baroque pearl, modern architecture truly arrives at the status of poetry in motion.
2 Miho Museum I.M. Pei is best known for resounding Modernist statements like the Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. For this project in the hills of a nature preserve near Kyoto, Japan, he chose literal understatement--80% of the main building is belowground. But first he leads visitors along a wooded pathway, through a tunnel and over a cable suspension bridge, an enchanted path to buried art treasures.
3 New Amsterdam Theater When it opened in 1903, it was a showplace on New York City's 42nd Street. In the bump and grind of the years after, both the street and the theater saw hard times. By the 1980s, the New Amsterdam was a wreck. Now, after a wizardly revitalization by Hugh Hardy, one sponsored by the Walt Disney Co., it's back in all its rose-bowered, peacocked, multichromed, Art Nouveau glory.
4 The Getty Center Los Angeles may not be the Athens of America, but it now has its own Acropolis. With a mere $1 billion from the Getty Trust, architect Richard Meier has performed a feat of late-Modernist classicism, a complex of art research, museum and conservation facilities that sits on a hill along the San Diego Freeway, quietly emanating the notion that civilization is whatever it is that produces buildings like these.
5 The Lion King The Broadway audience might have settled for the animated feature plopped directly (and predictably) onstage. But director and costume designer Julie Taymor wanted to create a different kind of fascination. Through puppetry, shadow figures and masks, Taymor makes her Lion King--at the renovated New Amsterdam Theater (see above)--the master of a powerful realm, ancient and African, full of ritual, magic and awe.
6 Mateo's Crib It's baby's first convertible--a rocking cradle that segues neatly into a bassinet. Designed by Alberto Mantilla and Anthony Baxter of Curve I.D., it's intended to rockabye babies between birth and six months. The body, of molded plywood with an ash veneer, rests on a table base of solid ash. It has the simplicity of a Shaker basket with a touch of nursery humor, yet even those smiles are functional handles. Mies van der Rohe himself would smile at that.