Purple Haze - Financial Times: The Business

Even if you are Frank Gehry, it is not every day that a man comes to your studio, looks around and says: “Build me something swoopy.” Yet that is what happened when Paul Allen, who founded Microsoft with his schoolfriend, Bill Gates, visited the world-famous architect to discuss Experience Music Project. This was Allen's dream of an interactive music museum, to be built in his native Seattle, birthplace of Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana and “grunge”.

Called EMP by his staff and local people, it is now taking shape in anticipation of May’s opening. It will span 140,000 square feet combining, in state-of-the-art technology, a museum, theme park, performance space and education facility, all devoted to popular music. It brings together Allen, 47, wired world visionary and the world’s third-richest man (he is reckoned to be worth about $26bn), and Gehry, the 70-year-old architect of Bilbao's Guggenheim museum. Jody Patton, Allen’s sister and EMP’s executive director, has planned and overseen the project.

Seattle is the high-tech hub of the US, home to the Microsoft's founders and 36,000 other “Microsoft millionaires” — those former or current employees who have seen their fortunes soar with the company’s. EMP is situated in downtown Seattle, opposite an amusement park called The Fun Forest and near two of the city’s existing tourist attractions, the Seattle Centre and the Space Needle, an obelisk which has spectacular views over Lake Washington.

EMP's multi-coloured, mushroom shape is so revolutionary that Seattle hopes it will repeat the "Bilbao effect" and bring millions of visitors. Even Gehry says he is impressed by it. "I'm shocked by its beauty," he said, with a cheeky smile. when I interviewed him at his studio in Santa Monica, California, where he lives with his Panamanian wife, Bema, and two daughters and two sons.

He is a white-haired, rather cuddly figure, with the absent-minded air of a university professor. He has warmth and smiles often, waving his hands about in gently swaying gestures, rather like the buildings he designs. He said that he and Allen had hit it off straightaway when they met five years ago: "l asked him what he liked about my work. what he'd seen, what did he want to accomplish with us. He looked at me and said 'swoopy'. So I replied, “Well, that's a new architectural term I haven't yet heard.”

"l liked 'swoopy' he went on, "It was an endearing term, which endeared Paul Allen to me. For someone with that much money, usually they come in and push people around. ‘Swoopy’ was sweet and unpretentious. It was the way I feel about my work, so I felt very close to him when he said that. I love using the term now. I even use it in my lectures when I talk about my buildings."

Allen wanted swoopy and, boy, is he getting it: The museum is costing about $100m (£62.5m), not counting the undisclosed tens of millions for equipping the interiors, using the most innovative technology "It's a one-of-a kind. Nobody is going to build anything like it again; it's too expensive," the architect admits. "I can give you a flat piece of metal for one dollar; a single curve, like a cylinder, for two dollars, but when you smoosh [American for "scrunch"] it about, it's 10 times more."

EMP is five luscious, rounded shapes, in bright red, purple, light blue, dull gold and silver, that look as if they’ve come right out of a fairy tale. Its colourful skins are made of stainless steel and painted aluminium, folded over a steel-rib structure which is filled in with "shotcrete", or sprayed-on concrete, flanges have then been welded on. in hedgehog-like fashion, to hold the metal cladding. The shapes are separate yet close together, and are united by an undulating glass roof. The design was inspired by guitar shapes, and images of rock 'n' roll bands playing in warehouses and loft spaces. For research, Allen gave Gehry The Ultimate Guitar Book, by Tony Bacon.

“We started making compositions, sketch models — at first, literally from pieces of cut-up guitars, then taking some shapes from a conference room we did in the Bank in Berlin, which Allen particularly liked," says Craig Webb, one of Gehry's collaborators. "We went through a programming phase, where you define each of the rooms in conjunction with the curatorial staff, and then we made block models, taking each of the [coloured] elements of the building, making woodblocks out of them, and arranging them based on the relationship they have with each other."

Gehry’s studio, which employs 130 people, is littered with these block models, in different shapes and sizes; they are endlessly refined until a final design crystallises. Gehry works with a computer programme called CATIA, first developed for the aerospace industry, which calculates surface and floor area, digitising points of the models to make three-dimensional structures. Bilbao would not have been possible without the use of CATIA, nor the Disney Concert Hall, currently being constructed by Gehry in Los Angeles. It has speeded up the process of designing and budgeting, enabling him to work on several big projects at any given time. One of these is Maggie's Centre, the cancer care centre in Dundee; another is an enormous brick-and-stainless steel building for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Gehry’s design for EMP has moved on from Bilbao, but his sense of humour is always there. EMP has a monorail going through one of the shapes, a white train that looks like a Dinky toy until you realise it has real passengers. “The fact that the train runs through it is great,” says artist Richard Serra, a close friend of Gehry's for 25 years. "It had a little bit of a juxtaposed jelly-bean look, but then it got clearer and tighter."

Gehry’s audacity is apparent the moment you enter and find yourself in a huge dinosaur's ribcage, with platforms built at different levels for various activities and displays, and with exposed steel ribs, fire-proofed in a pale-grey colour colour. In the main computer control room, coils of liquorice leads are woven into orderly plaits and run down the walls. "We didn't want the building to be a precious object." says Webb. "We wanted to strike a balance between refinement and looseness."

EMP will certainly divide opinion — which is fine by the Allen family. It’s huge challenge to design a building that reflects contemporary music." says Paul's sister, Jody Patton. "We feel this design is powerful and inspiring music itself."

The design evokes a giant, smashed-up Stratocaster, the kind that Hendrix used to shatter and burn on stage. Allen is a Hendrix fan; seeing Hendrix play was an important moment in his life, and EMP grew out of his wish to build a museum in his honour, an idea later expanded to include all strands of popular music. Allen himself is an accomplished guitar player and singer/songwriter, whose band, The Grown Men, play in Seattle.

A generous philanthropist, who still has a 5 per cent stake in Microsoft, he invests in his passions through his company, Vulcan Northwest, part of which funds civic activities in Seattle. "He began in a big way, slightly before Bill [Gates] did," says Bob Watts, chief executive officer of the Seattle chamber of commerce, "What he's done is almost incalculable."

Watts says that Seattle. which hosted the World Trade Organisation conference last December, is embarking on a programme of internationalisation: "Our future lies in being connected with the outside world " Allen's vision also stresses "connectivity" and facilitating universal access to information, education and entertainment.

But what will actually be inside his gigantic pleasure dome? Patton is inventing a concept of what a museum should be, one in which the visitor is also a participant. The museum's purpose is to "help individuals be in touch "'with their own creativity" using EMP's technology. This involves a system called "the Mollie", an audio-guide-cum-minicomputer. which visitors can hang round their neck and use to download information and music from exhibits onto a floppy disc. People can also access the museum from home the Electric Library, a huge database on the EMP web site, which collates films, information and video clips on music since the 1930s.

The Mollie accompanies you through the museum's various galleries, "Northwest Passage" is a journey through the music of the Pacific Northwest, including Hendrix and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.Allen wanted swoopy and, boy, is he getting it: The museum is costing about $100m (£62.5m), not counting the undisclosed tens of millions for equipping the interiors, using the most innovative technology "It's a one-of-a kind. Nobody is going to build anything like it again; it's too expensive," the architect admits. "I can give you a flat piece of metal for one dollar; a single curve, like a cylinder, for two dollars, but when you smoosh [American for "scrunch"] it about, it's 10 times more."

The "Hendrix Gallery" displays the world's best collection of Hendrix artefacts. The “Guitar Gallery” demonstrates the instrument's evolution and includes guitars owned by Hendrix, Chuck Bern and Bob Dylan; and "Milestones" is an exploration of fan culture. "If we do things wrong, the net effect of celebrating great artists is intimidation," says senior curator Jim Frick. "We don't want to put them on such a high pedestal that they feel intimidating rather than inspiring."

Once inspired, you can try your hand at being creative in "the SoundLab", for which Andrea Weatherhead , its creator. invented "platforms", or sound-proof cubicles, where you can sing and play guitar, keyboards, bass and drums, try mixing and sampling. experience being "live" on stage, and even take a poster of yourself home to prove that you've been there and done it.

In addition, there is "SkyChurch", a performance space named after Hendrix's vision of a gathering place for musicians, and "Artist's Journey", a theme park ride developed by a special effects company in Los Angeles called Digital Domain. Paul Zumwalt, construction project manager, promises visitors a new experience: "They might fly or tear the roof off."

“Tearing the roof off” has been Gehry’s effect on modern architecture. His radical interpretation of Allen's vision is the latest adventure in a body of work that started in 1978 with his own suburban home in Santa Monica, when he annoyed neighbours by wrapping his house in plywood and mesh, building windows at strange angles, and putting a chain-linked fence around the balcony. “It looked like someone had gone nuts,” says the US artist and sculptor, Bryan Hunt. “Everything was upside down and turned around.”

Gehry was born in Toronto in 1929, and as a child he built little cities with his grandmother, using wood scraps discarded from a furniture factory around the corner from her house. His family moved to Los Angeles when he 18, and he created a reasonably successful architectural practice, but worldwide acclaim did not come until his 60s, with the Bilbao Guggenheim, which has made him all the more appreciative of creativity’s elusiveness.

"I'm intuitive — I follow my nose, as it were — and I think Paul Allen probably thinks that way, too, " he explains. "Creativity is scam you don’t know exactly what re going to do. There's a bit of fear, and I think that's what keeps me grounded or humble."

The success of Bilbao, which attracted 1.3m visitors during its first year, in 1997, "hasn’t caught up with my head yet", he told me. “[Fellow architect] Philip Johnson called me the other day, out of the blue, and said, 'why aren't you arrogant?' I told him I was taking arrogance lessons, but it wasn't going too well.”

Serra says that Gehry’s congenial manner actually masks a fiercely competitive spirit, but that in collaboration with others, “he is able to stand back and give you veto power”

In Serra's view, Bilbao has changed the course of architecture by abandoning "the tyranny of the right-angle". It has a low-key, relaxed spirit that is a rarity among modern art museums, an approach that has been developed much further by EMP.

Gehry is now a big celebrity in Bilbao: people on the street say to him, "thank you. Mr Gehry". The Guggenheim's public affairs director, Nerea Abasolo, says that he has given people a new pride in their city and Seattle has similar expectations.

"I'd like to build cities," Gehry says, discussing his ambitions. “My buildings are metaphorical little cities. I'm really struggling with what kind of urbanism makes sense today, in a world which supports pluralism and democracy and freedom of choice, and which creates chaos and a collision of ideas.”

This helps explain why he likes working closely with clients, involving them in every step of the process; and why he is willing, at times, to go back to the drawing-board. He did this when Allen objected to an intermediate model of EMP, in which the five parts were too integrated for his taste.

"He came in to see it and it shook him," says Gehry "l realised he hadn't seen the evolution. It was devastating. It took us a few days to recover from it. I wrapped myself up in it, and that’s how we got to the final design. I can understand how he felt: “I bought this thing and, all of a sudden, I got this junk pile.”