Museum of Pop Culture

This guide to the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle tracks how a modest fifty-million-dollar rock and roll museum, backed by Paul Allen, ballooned in cost by the time it opened in 2000. It follows architect Frank Gehry, who skipped blueprints and sliced apart electric guitars in his studio, arranging the smashed necks and bodies on a table as his model for the roofline above you. From there his team turned to a three-dimensional design program originally built for French fighter jets to translate those shapes into steel and aluminum.