Yet it was Gehry’s contact during the late ’50s and ’60s with the leading artists on the LA scene and subsequently with East Coast figures like Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and others that was ultimately instrumental in shaping his iconoclastic attitude toward architecture and the city. It is no surprise, given Gehry’s avoidance of ideological stances, that he would appropriate their ideas over the years in unorthodox and at times unrigorous ways. For example, when his clients for the Winton Guest House (1983–87) turned out to be too fastidious for the messy "potting shed" scheme he initially proposed to them, he was able to switch formal referents, without any sense of self-contradiction, from Rauschenberg to Morandi. As Serra has put it, not without admiration, "One of his greatest achievements is to collect the history of contemporary art and with an unabashed wit, cunning and playfulness make it his own vocabulary."

Still, it is easy enough to trace a coherent path from the late-modernist object-volumetrics of Danziger and Davis in the ’60s through the fractured assemblages of the Santa Monica house (first renovation, 1977–78), Loyola Law School (1978–), and the California Aerospace Hall (1982–84) in the late ’70s and ’80s to the more fluid, performative, and "baroque" idiom of the Guggenheim Bilbao (1991–97) and the Experience Music Project (1995–2000) in the ’90s. Interestingly, Gehry’s move toward a more disruptive and excessive formal language occurs (one might say creeps in) first at the roof level of his buildings— a literal example is the Norton Simon Gallery and Guest Facility (1974–76). Perhaps his trajectory from the aesthetics of late modernism to neo-Baroque spectacle most closely parallels that of Frank Stella in the art world during these same years, which is not to impute any direct influence (although there have been admiring exchanges between the two over the years, and Stella has attempted a Gehry-inspired architecture) but rather to suggest that they were responding to similar aesthetic intuitions.

Gehry relates in his 1999 interview with Forster how an installation of a double row of firebricks by Carl Andre at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966 was a kind of epiphany for him. Not only did they evoke the world of industrial production, but more important, as installed in the space of the gallery, they offered a radically new form of aesthetic experience. The standardized building material had a tactile and sensuous dimension, but it wholly lacked the interiority associated with more "humanistic" substances like wood and stone. The Minimalist installation thus induced an experience of depthlessness, the ungroundedness of the copy without an original— not 155 firebricks, as Gehry puts it, but "firebrick, firebrick, firebrick, firebrick . . ." This experiential paradigm extended from the object to the space of the gallery or museum.

Paradoxically, of course, it was precisely the revelation of the lack of depth that proved fatal to the high-art practice of Minimalism. It was no longer possible to sustain the myth of art’s autonomy, nor that of the inviolate space of the gallery, nor to draw distinctions between artifacts of industrial production and those of mass culture. The difference between an Andre and, say, an Oldenburg was erased. The whole debased world of consumerism, embraced by Pop art, could thus enter Gehry’s architecture. He now turned to the visual chaos and junkscape of the late-twentieth-century city as his material stratum. Ultimately, the ephemerality and superficiality of that world would open the doors to the more fantastical and spectacular conception of architecture he pursues at present, as if to exploit the junkscape’s alchemical rather than chemical potential. "I’m taking your language [and] making it into something better," Gehry says he tells his clients. "I’m taking your junk and making something with it." Thus, unlike some of his architectural contemporaries, who continue either to resist the chaos by returning to Minimalist precepts (for example, the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron) or else to analyze and comment on it (Rem Koolhaas), Gehry deliberately seeks to aestheticize, to transmute dross into art. His ribbonlike metallic walls, warped volumes, and bulging window frames evoke a dream— or nightmare— world of sand castles and fairy tales, but uncannily realized in three dimensions and made to accept practical functions. What distinguishes this world from that of Disney, aside from its greater artistry, is its radical heterogeneity and the euphoric acknowledgment of its own superficiality.

In an essay of 1982 entitled "The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence," Jean Baudrillard described the Centre Pompidou as a centripetal and diabolical machine that sucked culture into the void of the warehouse/supermarket for art. The Bilbao Effect (a term Peter Eisenman claims, perhaps with some envy, to have coined) is predicated on opposite dynamics. Centrifugal rather than centripetal, magical rather than machinic, Bilbao celebrates the reconsecration of the museum as a space of art. Here Paul Scheerbart’s and Bruno Taut’s early twentieth-century vision of a crystalline necklace of "city crowns"— jewel-like buildings serving as both local centerpieces and constituents of a far-flung utopian community— is reprogrammed for the commodity culture’s logic of endless circulation. The global Guggenheim materializes in the hollow space of Gehry’s architecture.

I am reminded of an old cartoon by Gahan Wilson. A figure in a foolscap is standing on a soapbox inscribed with the letter "N" in the middle of a public square filled with an enormous, cheering crowd. The image is reminiscent of the Bilbao museum in the center of its swirling urban plaza— or perhaps of Jeff Koons’s topiary Puppy guarding the descent to the museum’s threshold. In the cartoon two tiny figures deep in the crowd are whispering to one another, "Is Nothing sacred?" In the Gehry universe, the answer is that nothing is sacred but Art. Art, that is, understood as an excessive, impossible, even farcical dream of freedom, imagination, and pleasure. No wonder the crowd is cheering.

Joan Ockman is the director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University.