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Am I Experienced?Finding sound amid the noise at Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project.

By Jasen Emmons
Posted Friday, March 16, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

(Note: This is the second in Culturebox's series of architecture reviews by people who actually work in or use the buildings in question. Click here to read Brent Staples' piece on his jury duty stint in Richard Meier's new courthouse.)

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Any day now I'm going to fall in love with the Experience Music Project building, Frank Gehry's most recent fun house of a museum. It's too late for a full-throttle swoon—the building is nearly a year old—but I'm still hoping for sparks. 

I work for EMP as a multimedia producer but not in the museum itself, because Gehry neglected to include offices for most of the staff. Instead I work a block away in a brown inverted pyramid, on the same floor that used to serve as the former headquarters for Muzak (each office still features a Muzak volume control knob, mercifully disconnected). I drive by the building every morning on my way to work, and as part of the museum's grand opening last June, I produced a kiosk about the building of the structure, tracing its evolution from Gehry's first sketches through construction. The project gave me a solid appreciation for the building's architectural pirouettes, but I'm still trying to get my head around some of Gehry's choices.

There's one vantage point from which the building coheres perfectly—when I'm standing in the middle of the Seattle Center's Fun Forest amusement park, facing what Gehry considers the front of the museum. The architect has talked about wanting to pull the Fun Forest's energy into the building, and he's succeeded wildly. On either side are timeless amusement rides: the whirling bobsleds, the swinging Viking ship, the rattling roller coaster, and the thrilling water ride. EMP rises before me, a blinding purple cliff sandwiched between a polished silver hump and a bulging pool-liner. The blue and green glass that cascades across the opposite side of the building mimics the rails of the roller coaster.

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But on my daily commute I only see the back of the building, where its multi-hued, amorphous shapes are oddly indistinct on cloudy days and blinding on rare sunny ones. Each of these shapes sports a different color: polished silver, burnished gold, psychedelic purple, arrest-me red, and a gentle blue. Gehry has said that a book on guitars inspired the colors. Think of silver guitar strings and whammy bars, a gold Les Paul, a red Telecaster. Purple, of course, is for Jimi Hendrix, even if he never owned a guitar that color (as for the pale blue, no self-respecting guitarist would be caught dead playing an ax in that shade). My personal favorite is the gold section, which follows the arc of the monorail as it passes through EMP, and whose stainless-steel tiles resemble the folds of a stunning gold curtain. But each time I look at the shapes together, I'm overwhelmed by the clash of colors. Even if you take them in pairs, it's hard to figure. Purple and silver would work well for a pro sports franchise, and the purple and gold may have won over a few Washington Huskies fans, but purple and red? Gold and pale blue? Gehry may have wanted the exterior to reflect the energy and fluidity of rock 'n' roll, but examining the cacophony of colors is like being forced to listen to feedback for too long.

EMP is a cross between a traditional art museum, intended to showcase awe-inspiring genius, and a participatory lab where visitors are encouraged to develop their own musical knowledge and creations. It's as if the Metropolitan Museum of Art provided oils and palettes for visitors to create their own Monets. Accordingly, EMP's interior spaces alternately remind you of your puniness in the rock 'n' roll pantheon and encourage you to claim your part in it. The main areas fall in the first category: The first few times I walked around, I stumbled along slack-jawed. Most of the time I had no idea where I actually was in the building, and it took me a week to find my way around. Just off the main entrance is Sky Church, which soars four stories high and features a massive screen playing music videos. The museum's largest space, it doubles as a 1,200-person concert venue and all-purpose central gathering place. The space must make performers feel like rock gods, but it makes me feel like a pipsqueak. On the other hand, the museum also features some more intimate spaces, designed for personal experimentation. There's Sound Lab, where visitors can retreat to cozy pods to learn new guitar licks or step into soundproof rooms to hone their chops.

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The building has a couple of minor practical drawbacks. Before the museum opened, I spent several days checking every artifact and audio clip in the exhibit What Is the First Rock 'n' Roll Record? After three or four hours, my legs were ready to buckle. I finally realized it was because of the building's concrete tile floors. Gehry undoubtedly chose them for their rough-hewn look, but their texture can exhaust the hardiest visitor. Meanwhile, most visitors miss one of the museum's gems, a 200-person theater with walls that consist of perforated plywood. The room feels like a lavishly appointed honeycomb. Unfortunately, the hive is usually empty because the theater is so well hidden that the only people who stumble into it are visitors searching for a bathroom or a place to rest.

EMP has much louder critics than me, judging from the e-mail people send us. A local architect asked if Paul Allen had been taking the same pharmaceuticals as Jimi Hendrix when he approved the design. "We are trying to keep kids OFF drugs, remember?" A number of people generously offered donations to have the building blown up. Then there was Squirrel Man, who complained that the glare from the building's purple stainless-steel tiles was adversely affecting the eyesight of the Seattle Center's myriad squirrels and who threatened litigation against the museum for light pollution.

Squirrel Man and half of Seattle's residents might be ready to turn down the volume on EMP, but give us time to recover from our shock. After all, most Americans were supposedly horrified the first time they saw Elvis shake and shimmy on the Ed Sullivan Show, but try and find anyone today who'll admit it. Even though I don't fully get its design, I have a feeling that in 20 years, people may look at EMP and wonder why Gehry didn't crank it up even louder.

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Jasen Emmons is a multimedia producer at the Experience Music Project and the author of the novel Cowboy Angst.
Photograph of Experience Music Project building exterior by Timothy Hursley. Photograph of interior stairway and monorail detail courtesy of Experience Music Project.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


I have lived in Seattle for twenty years, and have rather fond memories of a bizarre-looking restaurant not far from Seattle Center. The building was all plaster-of-paris white; and amorphously shaped like a giant fungus, or perhaps a tumor. It was universally known to locals as "The Blob". The restaurant was never financially successful, and changed hands several times before it was finally leveled about seven years ago.

I haven't been to the EMP (I've heard there are some cool things inside, but it's a $20 ticket). However, when relatives come to visit, we usually try to drive them by the building, just so we can all marvel at what an excrescence it is. Picture a Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a hooker's wardrobe, tossed in a pile on the floor. Or an oversized Legoland Mondrian, two-thirds melted in a microwave. In a city known for its undistinguished architecture, the EMP is spectacularly undistinguished.

I actually like the design of Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao; though I haven't been there, either. But the EMP would never have been built with this design if Gehry hadn't been the current "hot" architect. It will last longer, but my prediction is that in 25 years the EMP will seem about as forward-looking as the Bubble-ator. (Seattle natives know what I'm talking about.)

--Devil's Advocate

(To reply, click here.)


Sadly, the uglier a new design is, the more it sticks out, and the more it ends up representing the era it was designed in. Now, just add a little nostalgia (not hard after 20 years--think of all the god-awful pop songs you love from the early 80s) and you end up with a beloved icon. The Eiffel Tower is the most hideous oil well on the planet

--Seth Baldwin

(To reply, click here.)


What is a building? Right up until the 1920's most people thought it was a container. In Weimar it was discovered to be a program for space...as though they anticipated the profanation of all culture through the metaphor of the computer decades later. But a programmer of space is a clerk, not a genius or an artist. For two full generations architects have vacillated about their fall in status. Gehry accepts it completely, and manages to make a silk purse out of the pig's ear of pomo pretence.

Once the architect's objective was a fitting site for the encounter between god and man. Then the architect became the packagers of man's experience of himself, and their objective was the preservation of social order. Lately they were the schedulers and routers of commerce, and used their old sacred skills and psychological methods to puff up the shrines of commercial transaction.

Now, finally, they are reduced to clerks working in the great bureaucracy of information, and Gehry is the first to accept this completely. He seems to be drawing attention to himself, but his identity dissolves in the métier of his programming. His subject cuts into the frame like a cubist and he loves the unsentimental aggression of the highly artificial, but it is not his ego on stage. It is his complete obedience to subject that, like a great librarian or accounts clerk, makes the subject seem inevitable and its programming an act of nature.

How do you program culture? In a recycled tin can--voila: Minneapolis. How do you program the rock and roll fantasies of an aging billionaire sybarite? In the wreckage of a 57 Chevy carrying a bunch of Stratocasters to the dump. Voila, the history of indigenous American music reduced to a giant Speak and Spell computer programmed with the narcissism of an air guitar player.

--Zeitguy

(To reply, click here.)

 (3/19)

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