It's an installation that is architecture in its own right, rather than a piece of exhibition design. And it sets the scene for a procession of stunning models that takes you from Gehry's first houses in California in the 1970s to his giant cultural projects that have done so much to set the agenda at the turn of the century. These are not the icily perfect white models of an architect attempting to impose his own sense of order on a reluctant world. They have the rough feeling of the cardboard furniture that Gehry was making in the Sixties when he was hanging out with Claes Oldenburg and Richard Serra. Next month, Mies van der Rohe, the twentieth century's great architectural perfectionist, is the subject of two shows opening simultaneously at the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art.
Architecture is as high on the cultural agenda in New York as it has ever been.
Conspiracy theorists might see all three exhibitions as a reflection of political strategies developed by ambitious museums that are bitter rivals in the high stakes game played for endow ments, sponsorship, visitors and visibility that all must now engage in. They constantly jockey for position with each other and are anxious to manipulate the cultural climate in which they must operate. Both architects have close relationships with the institutions showing their work. Gehry has done as much as anyone in establishing the Guggenheim as an internationally famous museum. And the biggest single model in the show is Gehry's bravura plan for a Guggenheim building in Manhattan that would sit over the East River on stilts at the end of Wall Street.