I'm speaking to you from March 2003, and last week Clevelanders were heartbroken to learn that their beautiful new five-story Peter B. Lewis Building with the complicated titanium roof at the business school at Case Western University is a nuisance and a menace. When the hot Cleveland sun is shining, the campus pedestrians are blinded by all that shiny metal - the CNN report says, "the glint off the steel tiles is so powerful that standing next to the building is like lying on a beach with a tanning mirror."

And here during its first winter, they're finding out that this $62 million masterpiece dumps snow off its sloping surfaces and hangs dangerous-looking two-foot icicles off at least one roof edge.

And the master architect, Frank O. Gehry, would tell you, "But that's fine, sweetie," in tones that would say, get used to snow. And get used to your status.

It's true, Gehry has had some great performances and he makes the world more interesting, but he's not thinking of you when he designs these things. He's not even thinking of the client. He's expressing himself. The point of every Frank O. Gehry building is the continued appreciation of Frank O. Gehry.

Credentials:

Of American architects Gehry is the obvious giant. Gehry has presumably been rumpled for years now, but he became a rumpled giant in 1998 or so, the same year I drove out to see his landmark Santa Monica house on that quiet residential corner, the same week I saw his face inflated to huge proportions up above Wilshire Boulevard as part of Apple's Think Different campaign.

That Santa Monica house, his own residence, remodeled twice now and standing (accessible to the point of vulnerability) on a modest suburban corner, looks cut-and-pasted then shaken into a loose stability. No, actually, it looks pre-disastered. It looks like the beginning of some whole California thing. And it's definitely a sculpture first and a house after.

All the big modern Gehry projects, and there are plenty, indulge in all kinds of bending planes and expressive forms and swooping, wobbling gestures. They're sculptures. Disney Hall, which has been rusting in downtown L.A. for years now, in a state of permanently frozen explosion, seems rusted into place at the moment of creation, a rhythmic visual pun amazing to look at. The Fred-and-Ginger building in Prague is a kick-ass sculpture with a great whimsical tone.

But Bilbao is the Gehry project that really counts. First on the list.

It's a great success, the Bilbao, commercially. Tourist traffic at Bilbao is up 500% or something like that. It redefined the entire city's image from roughly-like-Marseilles to Barcelona-Junior. And it gave lots of people in the architectural community lots of ideas, there's the Billboard Argument that goes, hey, this design is like a brand, the brand is a recognizable and valuable commodity, and this building itself is a tourist attraction. So whatever sacrifices the clients and users have to make is well worth it. Squinting in Cleveland traffic is a small price to pay for all this sculptural beauty.

The Bilbao Effect / Billboard / Bobo Argument is a brilliant justification for letting Frank Gehry express himself as often as possible, and the novel and scintillating notion of a building as a tourist destination swept like wildfire across the profession exactly as if it had never heard of the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, the Corn Palace in Mitchell South Dakota or the other two or three buildings on the planet that were already considered tourist attractions.

*sigh* Sometimes I honestly don't know what they're thinking.

Crimes:

More of a left-handed accomplishment than a crime, but Gehry's $240M Experience Music Project in Seattle succeeds in re-defining ugly. It's spectacularly, transcendentally ugly. "Hideous blight" doesn't cover it. "Obscene" comes close.

And you could make the case that Gehry bankrupted one of his clients, the American Center in Paris. Again, not much of a crime. It's a peculiar building, not so much ugly as a sinister cartoon, and it's been empty for years. It would make a good Secret Police headquarters in a Dr. Seuss spy movie.

Despite those misdemeanors Gehry is known to behave better than most other star architects. He respects the context (mostly) and tries to understand the clients' needs (lately). And we should all buy Mr. Gehry lunch some day because he speaks English.

So what's the crime?

Gehry's crime is that sculptures are not made to live in. If you've ever slept rough and tried to curl up for the night in a Brancusi you know exactly what I mean. The floor plan of Gehry's Schnabel house tells you the same thing when you imagine living there. Sometimes Gehry does a good job of balancing all of this flamboyant figurative experimentation with the function, and sometimes he doesn't. Unavoidably, though, the concentration is always on how the building looks instead of how it performs or how it feels.

Gehry's sculptures will also not shut up. They're photogenic and attention-getting, yes, but you can't get them to stop. They continually draw attention to themselves. It's like a ringing cell phone, hello it's the architect calling, tugging on your sleeve, how do you like me now? And now? Hello? This has an impact on users that goes beyond a matter of taste. These spatial complications and challenges literally require attention, and they raise the users' arousal level and information load, which is not always good. This can be disorienting. Legibility flies out the window.

Then there's that sort of arbitrary quality that raises questions in the back of your head. Why do the contorted titanium sails of that Chicago Millennium Park band shell take those particular shapes? There's no reason. Aren't they expensive? Yeah, twice the original budget, they had to float a bond issue. For what? For…. this.

Some shoes are so beautiful that you don't care if they hurt. Pretty shoes can be worth a certain amount of self-punishment, sure. That makes sense. It makes sense until somebody tells you that beautiful shoes can be comfortable at the same time. And baby, those $240M shoes you bought in Seattle? Girl, they put the ug in ugly.

Frank Gehry won the Pritzker in 1989 and lost it in one of his pockets.