As I head to Portland today I thought I would post this image from the pacific northwest. This unique sculptural architecture by Frank O. Gehry is situated in Central Seattle and houses the Seattle Center: Experience Music Project. As most of Gehry’s projects, this one was not without controversy. The following comments are from Wikipedia

Even before groundbreaking, Seattle Weekly said the design could refer to “the often quoted comparison to a smashed electric guitar.” Indeed, Gehry himself had made the comparison, “We started collecting pictures of Stratocasters, bringing in guitar bodies, drawing on those shapes in developing our ideas.”^[6] The architecture was greeted by Seattle residents with a mixture of acclaim for Gehry and derision for this particular edifice. “Frank Gehry,” remarked British-born, Seattle-based writer Jonathan Raban, “has created some wonderful buildings, like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, but his Seattle effort, the Experience Music Project, is not one of them.”^[7] New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp described it as “something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died.”^[8] Forbes magazine called it one of the world’s 10 ugliest buildings.^[8] Others describe it as a “blob”^[9] or call it “The Hemorrhoids“.^[7]

Despite some critical reviews of the structure, the building has been called “a fitting backdrop for the world’s largest collection of Jimi Hendrix memorabilia.”^[10] The Outside of the building which features a fusion of textures and colors, including gold, silver, deep red, blue and a “shimmering purple haze,”^[11] has been declared “an apt representation of the American rock experience.”^[12]