This season, the wheel of architectural fashion has swung round to Frank Gehry. To many, the work of this California maverick strikes a note that seems fresh and honest in a field glutted by the studied and slick. A frequently told story from the colorful Gehry legend concerns a neighbor who felt passionately enough about the architect’s Santa Monica house to put a bullet through a window. Such vigilantism is in keeping with Gehry’s image as a wild man of the West, wielding his bag of carpenter’s tools instead of a computer printout and offending refined tastes with his constructions in raw wood, corrugated metal, and chain link.

Now fifty-nine, Gehry has been pursuing experimental design since the Sixties and has long enjoyed a following in the Los Angeles art community. But from the breathless press he has received this year, one would think Gehry had only now been discovered. For 1987 was the year Gehry’s underground reputation exploded into pop celebrity, owing largely to the first retrospective of his work. Organized by Mildred Friedman of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, this show has been a hit in museums across the country, coming to a triumphant final rest this spring at the institution most closely associated with Gehry’s role in the art world, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).[1]In June, Gehry will be the centerpiece of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art entitled “Deconstructivist Architecture,” for which its curator,