Experience Music Project

The Experience Music Project in Seattle is a museum dedicated to the exploration of creativity and innovation in popular music. The museum contains mostly rock memorabilia and technology-intensive multimedia displays, but is not limited to that. It was founded by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, and it is located in the Seattle city centre, near the Space Needle. The building was designed by Frank Gehry, bearing a lot of similarities to his other works. Its sheet metal construction resembles Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Much of the building material is exposed in the building's interior. Reminding many of a smashed guitar, Gehry himself stated: "We started collecting pictures of Stratocasters, bringing in guitar bodies, drawing on those shapes in developing our ideas." The architecture was greeted by Seattle residents with a mixture of acclaim for Gehry and derision for this particular edifice, some calling it a 'blob' and others 'the hemmorhoids'.