WHAT IS THE CULTURE OF BUILDING?

With its curved metallic forms, the new Guggenheim Museum in Spain has been widely acclaimed by architecture critics as the unique and original product of a highly creative architect. Like nothing the city of Bilbao had ever seen before, it caused at least one critic to remark that the twentieth century, at its end, had finally produced a building worthy of the times.

But of course the museum, for all of its innovation, is connected to the world around it. It is an example of a now-familiar economic strategy in which old industrial cities like Bilbao are trying to remake themselves with new cultural institutions.

MAYBECK RETURNS TO OREGON

Did you ever fantasize about doing an apprenticeship under one of the great master architects? Working with direct guidance from Frank Lloyd Wright or H. H. Richardson? Now that fantasy has become more realizable: the revered California architect Bernard Maybeck has recently returned to life and, surprisingly, returned to Oregon.

In the nineteen-teens, with little notice by architectural historians, Maybeck completed a wealth of design work for the small coastal town of Brookings.