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Frank Gehry's kaleidoscopic palace of American pop culture has a radical but inventive formal and material vigour.

As a relatively recent type, pop museums do not have an auspicious history. Nigel Coates' Museum of Popular Music perked up a dreary corner of Sheffield, but the internal displays (not Coates' work) have not attracted the expected visitor numbers. I. M. Pei's Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland remains a plodding exercise in monumental symbolism. (Building as record turntable.) Pop and rock music's natural territory oscillates between sweaty clubs, recording studios, hotel bedrooms and fortified mansions, all at some remove front the attentions of serious architecture. Mark Fisher's fantastical Brobdingnagian stage sets (AR June 1992) are about as close as architects ever get to rock and roll, which remains, despite Halls of Fame and Hard Rock Cafes, essentially uninstitutionalizable.

Yet Jimi Hendrix, one of rock's most flamboyant performers and pharmaceutical enthusiasts, shows every sign of being institutionalized. The site of his untimely demise in London's Mayfair was recently adorned with an English Heritage blue plaque, the imprimatur of metropolitan respectability. Now Seattle, the place of his birth, has gone several stages better with an entire building dedicated to Hendrix's legacy, underscored by wider, finer museological aims such as being able to explore and learn from the history of American popular music.

Designer of the Experience Music Project (named after Hendrix's old band The Experience) is Frank Gehry, no stranger to excess of the architectural kind. It seems a logical match, being temptingly easy to see Gehry's career of radical, inventive otherness reflected in Hendrix's dazzlingly creative but ultimately brief life. However, Gehry himself was not a card-carrying Hendrix aficionado. When the project was first mooted in the mid-1990s, he told the client 'This isn't my thing. I listen to Haydn'. Immersion in the Hendrix life and legend came later, through the tactful coaching of his associates.

The EMP was the brainchild of Paul Allen (a real Hendrix buff), who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates and so had the means and motivation to realize such an ambitious project. Conceived as a homage to Hendrix, the museum has 35 000 sq ft of exhibition space, housing an eclectic range of paraphernalia (guitars, photos, posters, costumes) together with an education centre, library and computerized interactive displays, chronicling the evolution of American popular music and the chance to add to history by hands-on creation. Choreographed by specialist exhibition designers, this gaudy panoply of 'edutainment' is housed in Gehry's kaleidoscopic sextet of squirming, writhing volumes, melded into each other like a pile of outsized tropical fish gasping their last on the streets of Seattle.

Located on the site of the 1962 World's Fair, EMP's psychedelic contours are an unmistakable presence on the city skyline, rivalling the Space Needle, a cod-futuristic tower left over from the Fair. Other adjacent relics include a small amusement park and monorail designed to link the Fair site with downtown Seattle. Somewhat surreally, this curves through the EMP at its south-east corner, neatly separating the Artist's Journey component ('lives and histories of popular music artists'; its billowing mass of sky blue folds have earned it the sobriquet 'The Madonna') from the main mass of the building. The stage-set quality of the site is reflected in EMP's extraordinary, almost scenographic architecture. In effect, the building is a huge black box, dissected, contorted, dandified and dressed up in some very fancy clothes.

Where the Bilbao Guggenheim (AR December 1997) explored a relatively muted palette of titanium and stone, here the special effects are unremitting. Inspired by the client's guitar collection, the coruscating variations in colour and texture have a hypnotically intense, painterly quality. Distinguished by their different skins, but sharing a formal kinship of languid fluidity, each of the six volumes houses a different aspect of the programme. Like a floating, three-dimensional puzzle, each piece is critical to the nature of the whole. The symbolic and physical hub is the Sky Church, envisaged by Hendrix as a place for people to gather spontaneously and make music. Clad in the stainless steel dipped in an acid bath to generate a luscious purple iridescence, the Sky Church forms the shimmering, voluptuous heart of the building. Red and sky blue enamelled aluminium panels, bead-blasted gold-tinted stainless steel, and matt stainless-steel cladding are employed on the other volumes, piling on the polychromy. Comp ared with this architectural acid trip, Bilbao seems almost sedate.

Gehry is known for testing the limits of construction, but the geometric complexities of this project were very nearly unbuildable. As ever, the translation of initial ideas to built form was achieved through a design and construction process that combined sophisticated computer software programs with a craft approach to building. Gehry uses the computer as an instrument of translation, rather than a generative device, to create his compellingly tactile architecture (ARs January 1993 and December 1997). Ideas evolved gradually, from initial sketches through a long series of handmade models. These were scanned into the computer and digitally translated back into working models and drawings, using the CATIA aerospace design program.

The cladding contractor developed software to derive the roof and wall panel shapes from the apparently random pattern modelled by the Gehry office. The programme flattened out each panel (some were double curved) and guided fabrication equipment which cut, drilled attachment holes and assembled the panels into units of 10 sq ft (approx 1 sq m). Units lock into one another with hidden connections and are clamped onto an armature formed from a network of 5in (130mm) diameter steel tubes. The armature is anchored directly to the undulating steel frame, which was also cut robotically, its contours derived from Gehry's computer models. Between cladding and structure is a sandwich of waterproofing, insulation and concrete (shotcrete), which was sprayed over steel reinforcement and wire mesh stretched between the steel ribs. The shotcrete locks the structure together, like architectural papier mache, giving it the necessary rigidity. Inside, the curved ribs are periodically visible, like a warped ribcage, as is th e shotcrete shell, communicating some sense of the ingenious tectonic processes underpinning the architecture.

Distinguished by its spirit of messy vitality, EMP is a heady cocktail of gee-whizzery and techno-glitz. Perhaps it tries a bit too hard -- its relentless exuberance is at times overwhelming -- but it certainly extends the Gehry oeuvre, with its formal vigour and constructional dexterity. You slightly fear for the effect of Seattle's notoriously wet climate on all those seductively glossy surfaces, but like the Bilbao Guggenheim, EMP puts a geographically far-flung city well and truly on the architectural map.

Architect

Frank O. Gehry & Associates, Los Angeles

Project team

Frank O. Gehry, James Glymph, Craig Webb, Terry Bell,

George Metzger, Laurence Tighe

Associate/exhibit architect

Loschky Marquardt & Nesholm

Engineers

Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire (structural)

Sparling (electrical)

Jaffe Holden Scarbrough, Cerami Associates (acoustical)

Sky Church designers

The Floating Company

Photographs

John E. Linden