The Forum will be the heart of the revamped museum, providing sight lines through the ground-floor and first-floor galleries that will simplify the flow among the exhibition spaces. Rendering copyright Gehry Partners LLP.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Rendering copyright Gehry Partners, LLP.

An overall site plan for the updated museum. Rendering copyright OLIN.

Lenfest Hall. Rendering copyright Gehry Partners LLP.

New underground galleries will be created by excavating earth and bedrock from below the museum's east plaza. Skylights will draw natural light into this subterranean space. Rendering copyright Gehry Partners LLP.

A vaulted underground walkway, long off limits to visitors, will become a new public space for art and events while providing a new north-south axis. Rendering copyright Gehry Partners LLP.

The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, designed by Frank Gehry, 1989.

Inside, white paint lightens up the middle of the building. A vintage Danish dining set and Cloud pendants by Frank Gehry for Vitra define the dining area.

The Frank Gehry Design Museum at Vitra HQ

An Introduction to Modern Textiles: Kit out your furniture in luxurious silk or no-frills leather,; textiles can add just as much dimension to room as art, and can be equally collectible.

Experience Music Project by Gehry Partners, Seattle 1999, shot for Vulcan, Inc. © Lara Swimmer

2008: Frank Gehry Inspired by da Vinci’s drawings of wooden catapults as well as seaside huts, Gehry’s vision for the Pavilion, his first built structure in England, was another signature, angular construction, a gorgeous glass-and-timber fractal floating above the ground. Photograph © 2008 Nick Rochowski

A COZY AND MODERN INDOOR-OUTDOOR BEDROOM IN BUENOS AIRES In Argentinean architect and furniture designer Alejandro Sticotti's bedroom, dappled sunlight and reclaimed-wood floors and walls give the room a warm, peaceful feel.

The building’s specific orientation on the site, neither parallel nor orthogonal to the street, allows galleries to receive a maximum amount of natural light.

Skylights allow for the natural variability of light to occur and reproduce the lighting embraced by Long Island artists, showing the versatility of each piece of art depending on weather conditions.

In creating this place for visitors to rest and take in the lush landscape, Herzog & de Meuron's lead architect Ascan Mergenthaler says the built-in benches put the concrete walls on a more “human scale” without interrupting the streamlined façade.

Maggie's Dundee exterior. Architect: Frank Gehry. Pic © Raf Makda, August 2003.

Fisher Center at Bard College by Gehry Partners, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 2003. © Bilyana Dimitrova

Dundee Exterior. Roof Architect: Frank Gehry. © Maggie's Centres

Dundee jetty. Architect: Frank Gehry. © Maggie's Centres.

Dundee exterior and landscape. Architect: Frank Gehry. Landscape Architect: Arabella Lennox-Boyd. © Maggie's Centres

“The building has feelings which I hope engender community activity, and that it’s comfortable for the patients to be there. It’s respectful of Chinese architecture and motifs.” —Frank Gehry

As his parents look on, Apolo plans his commute under a fire-top piece by the artist Michael Ricardo Andreev and alongside a Wiggle chair by Frank Gehry.

Most of the galleries at the new North Carolina Museum of Art are naturally daylit.

THE FRANK GEHRY RIGHT TWIST CUBE This cube is a multipurpose piece, as it can be used as a side table or a stool for sitting. Designed with a graceful twist, the cube works well as a singular accent, or as a complement to other pieces in the Frank Gehry collection.

The Wintons commissioned Gehry after reading about his work in The New York Times in 1982. It was the pick of a client with premonition, and as the final structure indicates, an open mind. The architect was asked to create a space for the Wintons' visiting family—five kids and plenty of grandchildren necessitated the extra room—and complement the main home, a brick Philip Johnson “donut” on a 12-acre plot on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. But Gehry followed his own muse, and often talked about the home he created as pure sculpture, according to Victoria Young, the Professor of Modern Architectural History at St. Thomas University and Coordinator of Frank Gehry’s Winton Guest House. “Even the original models have all these disparate shapes,” she says. “The first model he presented to them had a log cabin, referencing the fact that the Wintons' fortune came from Canadian lumber." Since it was a guest house, Gehry felt free to experiment. "You can explore things in a way you can’t in a place people live in all the time.”

Gehry’s first project outside of California, the 2,300-square-foot guest house represented more than a geographic transition. According to Young, this home was a key moment for the evolution of Gehry’s style. At a time when Philip Johnson was designing that AT&T building and quintessential postmodern structures were being built, Gehry was “breaking apart the understanding of a building. That’s what postmodernists do, but not the way Gehry does. He was doing something completely different. With Winton, he breaks apart the building, but hasn’t cladded it in the same material. It’s a really pivotal moment of breaking apart the structure into these shapes.”

“The Winton House combines Gehry’s love of sculpture, his interest in urbanism—as each form is said to be a building in a village—and his expression as an artist, given the relationship he cited with the painter Morandi,” says MacLear. The guest home provided an interesting contrast to the classical, International-Style modernism of Johnson’s main residence, perhaps a physical metaphor to where both architects were at in their careers, one a known master, the other a young creative trying to find his voice. “Philip Johnson loved Frank Gehry not only because they both loved art and architecture,” says MacLear, “but because Frank gave Philip what all mentors want—a new view into the ideas of the future.”

“It really synthesizes the ideas that turn out to be his signature style,” says Richard Wright, “The concept of a little village of disparate masses that come together to form a united structure, each with very different volumes and voices. You certainly see that in Bilbao and his true masterpieces. He was working on these ideas in houses before this, but I think he really nails it it with the Winton project.”

“The grandkids loved it; they loved the loft space,” says Young. “The light in that space is fantastic, it just creeps up the wall. [The house] is filled with all these unexpected moments.”

“Early in his career, Gehry was able to experiment with his own home—deconstructing rooms and functions into the shapes of the actual residence—and explore materials which are non-traditional,” says Christy MacLear, Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. “The Winton Guest House happens in ’87, and is the step between his own home and his commission at the University of Minnesota in ’90 where he moves his deconstructionist style toward what we see in ’97 in Bilbao.”

Wright’s auction estimate, $1,000,000 to $1,500,000, is not a high bar for a Gehry, as Richard Wright explains, but there will be some added cost for whomever has the winning bid. Moving the structure, a condition of purchasing the home, will probably require complete disassembly and a cross-country move on a flatbed truck. Wright was quoted $800,000 for a 110-mile move, and says no move within the continental United States would be more than $2,000,000. It’ll be interesting to see where the structure lands, in private hands or a museum, because as Young puts it, “nobody has figured out how to live in it full time.” The guest bedrooms don’t have much space for extra furniture, and the kitchen is just a simple galley kitchen.

Wiggle Side Chair designed by Frank Gehry, 1972.

Doug Reed, landscape architect on the project, incorporated indigenous plants into the surrounding site; the large expanse of meadows will flourish in the coming years.

Classic butterfly chairs from Universal Patio Furniture are stationed by the pool. The mural is by street artist Morley, a close friend.