Frank Gehry’s buildings seem to be from another planet

What’s the most difficult and stressful task that a human being can perform?
Brain surgery on the President of the United States maybe, or reentering the
Earth’s atmosphere in a malfunctioning Space Shuttle?

Or perhaps it would it be the task of designing a Frank Gehry building: a
several-hundred-million-dollar landmark that appears to be engaged in an
inadvisable late-night dare with gravity; a building that, when you get down
to it, has no real business being a building at all. Something like the
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which resembles a giant extraterrestrial insect
perched for a while on the bank of the Nervion River, ready to flutter back
into deep space at any moment.

It’s hard not to feel daunted by the prospect of interacting with the brain
responsible for Bilbao’s how-in-the-name-of-God-did-they-build-that curves,
not to mention the wildly implausible lines of the Walt Disney Concert Hall
in Los Angeles. Gehry’s reputation doesn’t help: he is described to me by
one of his close friends as “quiet and difficult”.