SANITIZING ROCK?

Frank Gehry’s latest project opens next week – the Experience Music Project in Seattle. “Gehry—who admits he prefers Haydn to Hendrix—bought a bunch of electric guitars in Seattle, took them back to L.A., chopped them up and reassembled the pieces into architectural shapes. That didn’t quite work, although the building—a lot rounder—stayed largely Stratocaster-colored. From a distance—say, a high hotel room about a mile away—the 140,000-square-foot EMP looks like a peculiar dessert: purple, red, silver, gold and baby-blue Jell-O with a garnish of green trees. Up close, it’s a trademark Gehry design, a mix of metals cladding ‘swoopy’ shells covering a careful floor plan.” – Newsweek