(continued)

Tucked away in the High Gallery, just a few steps up from Wright's rotunda floor, may be why (as the who-done-it detectives used to say) we have all been brought here. In isolation sits Gehry's resplendent model of the new New York Guggenheim, planned for a site on the Hudson River, just north of South Street Seaport.

This major retrospective of Gehry's work, as the powers-that-be at the Guggenheim would have it, is a prelude to a new age, a new museum.

During the Guggenheim's press preview held the day before the exhibit opened, museum director Thomas Krens spun the Gehry retrospective as the yang to Wright's ying. He pointed out that 48 years earlier the Guggenheim held a major retrospective of the work of another architect hailed as a genius of his time.

That architect, too, had designed a new building for the museum, and the show was held in a temporary structure on the very site where Wright's masterpiece would corkscrew out of Fifth Avenue. Krens wants history to repeat itself, about 80 blocks south.

While Wright was in every measure a genius (and he believed it, too) Gehry impresses more through his shy impishness. Somehow, you can't imagine the master of Taliesin waving his hand around the assembled works of a brilliant career, declaring "It's all my old stuff, and I don't want to look at it anymore." Although, in a sentiment Wright would have shared, Gehry confesses "it's fun to watch you look at it."

Twenty truckloads of Gehry models, sketches, drawings, studies, furniture, lamps, and assorted architectural detritus have invaded the Guggenheim — just a third, according to the architect, of what he's got stashed back in Santa Monica. This is a guy who never throws anything away.

If you are hoping for a show that puts the architect's work on a pristine pedestal, this is not it. There are very few finished renderings of the buildings, and carefully choreographed photographs are scant.

What we have here is what Gehry uses to design the buildings. The models are still smudged with fingerprints and cigarette ashes. Drawings are wiggling worms of creativity. You witness a Gehry design as it starts with simple massing models, then moves to crumpled cardboard, bent sheet-metal, creased plastic, carved foam-core boards, all the time becoming larger and larger in scale, more detailed in study.

One wall is covered with a few score study models of Disney's performance hall. The exhibit room dedicated to the Stata Center comes the closest to giving you a feel for what it's like in Gehry's studio, as you wander about the models, drawings, computer renderings, and material studies.

Some of the study models are nearly big enough to crawl into. It's a maze of raw, creative power, the evidence of a vigorous, inquiring, form-focused mind — that of a sculptor trapped in the body of an architect.

As one ascends the spiral the projects become bigger, bolder, wilder. The subtext here is the computer, which comes in quietly and begins to work its magic. It is not often in history when a change in how we create a drawing or a model allows a fundamental shift in architectural expression, but this is what the Gehry show reveals.

It's as if Gehry's will to form was waiting for just the right tool to come along to spring it free. Computers not only make it easier to create more accurate models and drawings of sculptural forms.

Gehry's office uses computer technology developed for producing aircraft. Today you can build a plane without paper. The critical step is that the computer drawings are the data with which the building is created by machines. Design moves seamlessly from the architect to the fabricator.

Clearly, this is the aspect of Gehry's work that most excites him. "You can build a building in virtual space," Gehry notes, "and you can translate that to the machines that will make the parts for the building." The computer brings liberation, Gehry believes, that returns the architect to the rightful place of master builder.

Typically, Gehry says, architects find themselves "infantilized" in the project team. "We are always 'the little woman,'" he notes, in the relationship between client, contractor, and architect.

The first two patronize the architect while maintaining the upper hand: "Gee, you are so creative, the design is really sweet, and we just love it. But we know how to build things, so you better just run along and leave it to us men to get it done." Gehry growls, "They don't know shit."

What Gehry wants, what all architects need, he believes, is a stronger relationship "with the hands that make the buildings."

Frank Gehry. Photo: Erika Barahona Ede Final design model, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Joshua White, courtesy Frank O. Gehry & Associates Winton Guest House, Wayzata, Minnesota. Photo: Mark Darley/Esto Sketch of Winton Guest House, Wayzata, Minnesota. Image: Frank O. Gehry & Associates Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany Photo: Jacob Hand, courtesy Frank O. Gehry & Associates Interior view, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany Photo: Peter Mauss/Esto Sketch of Lewis Residence, Lyndhurst, Ohio (unbuilt). Image: Frank O. Gehry & Associates Final design model, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California Photo: Whit Preston, courtesy Frank O. Gehry & Associates   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.