MCGUIGAN: Have you sensed a big change in the way people respond to you since Bilbao? GEHRY: Yeah, I’ve sensed a big change. There’s much more coming at me. And some of the stuff I would die to do. There’re people coming at me to do museums in Texas, in Pennsylvania, stuff in Germany. I can’t take it all on—it’s impossible. I’ve only got so much to give. And former clients have priority. The Basques in Spain came back with a little winery in Rioja they wanted me to do, a $10 million job. I tried to convince them they should get someone else, but the Basque president was involved, and they brought out the 1929 wine for me. OK, it was my birthday wine. So I’m doing that project.

You’re doing everything from a big complex at MIT to the expansion of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington to a tiny hospice center in Dundee, Scotland. When you’ve achieved something like Bilbao, how hard is it to move beyond that creatively? The good thing is that Bilbao was finished in my book five years ago. So before Bilbao hit and became the Bilbao that everybody is excited about, I had already designed a lot of projects that were in the can. They’re being built now. So, you know, I didn’t have to sit here and say, oh, God, what am I going to do now? I already did it. You know, I’m off. I’m way beyond Bilbao. (He laughs.)

One of those under construction is the Experience Music Project, the rock museum in Seattle commissioned by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. How did that design take shape? Paul Allen is a very easy person to like. He’s shy and not the big mogul the world sees. I said to him, what do you want? And he said, I want “swoopy.” It was a funny thing he said. But it was really very sweet, you know? So I brought him to the office, and I said, what’s swoopy here that you like? And he picked the model for the DG Bank in Berlin, with the conference-center form we call the “horse’s head.” I wanted to go from there anyway. It was incredible he went right to that.

You work by creating models, often dozens of them for a single project, pushing and changing the forms. How did you begin the process with Seattle? Two of my colleagues in the office are guitar players. We talked about broken guitars, and I did remember Jimi Hendrix breaking guitars onstage. There’s a guitar shop right near our office in Santa Monica; the guy makes these electric guitars. We got a bunch of broken chunks of guitar, piled them all up and started to look at the colors. In the end, I made one of the parts of the building the Purple Haze. It’s really beautiful.

And we spent time with Paul and his sister, Jody. We listened to their exhibit ideas. This is going to be some state-of-the-art thing—you know, the equivalent of a “2001” or a “Star Wars,” but on music.

Computers help in constructing your buildings by accurately plotting your abstract forms. But do you ever design those forms on the computer? The one piece I designed on the computer was the “horse’s head.” I had a dream of it, I knew what I wanted to do. And I sort of made the form in cloth, in velvet, and we sprayed wax on it. So I got it in the ballpark and then I put that in the computer and refined it. And I think it’s one of the best forms I’ve ever designed. It was done in three or four minutes. Because I had the image and I couldn’t hold the image in my head while I was looking at a screen with this horrible image. The screen dries everything out. It sucks the juice out. And I could only work on it for about three, three and a half minutes. So I’m not tempted to go back because of the pain. But I’m tempted to go back because of the result.

My fear of designing on the computer is that there’s a touch, a human touch, that I guard and try to translate from my own hand-eye coordination through the drawings, through the construction to the finished building. Somehow that goes through all of that process and gets to the finished building. That’s a miracle, that’s what it feels like.