The Pritzker Prize -- commonly referred to as "the Nobel of architecture" -- is the industry's loftiest recognition. It's a lifetime achievement award, granted to a living architect whose body of work represents a superlative contribution to the field. Gehry received it in 1989, two years before the release of the frenzy-inducing Gehry Collection, an innovative line of furniture, and nearly a decade before the unveiling of his titanium masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Basque capital of Spain.

There's really only one architect -- Frank Lloyd Wright -- who qualifies for household-name status in America, but with the onslaught of attention following Bilbao, Gehry may yet get there. For now, he is "the other Frank" with "the other Guggenheim," and his Spanish Guggenheim is nearly as controversial as was Wright's Manhattan original. The press coverage of Bilbao has been legion. Art and architecture critics have described it as everything from "an architectural epiphany" to "a lunar lander in search of its moon." Pop culture is equally split on the issue: The TV character Frasier has expressed his distaste for the design while Mariah Carey is dancing around on its lawn in her latest video. But the tourists and architecture buffs of the world have fallen under its spell.

The Basque Country Administration commissioned Gehry to design a building for its new museum that would attract visitors from around the globe, and that's exactly what it has done. Despite the city's seedy reputation, staggering murder rate and perpetual bad weather, some 2 million people have visited since the museum's opening in late 1997. One of the museum guards was killed at the opening by Basque separatists trying to blow up a Jeff Koons sculpture on the grounds, but still they come. Such is the draw of Gehry's glistening abstraction of a building.

In describing Gehry's "buildings" there's a tendency to employ art terms -- sculpture, collage, installation, assemblage -- because "building" just doesn't cover it. Gehry's love of architecture is about the process: the conceptualizing and mark-making and model-building, and that's what comes across in the final results. It's a rare story about Gehry's work that isn't accompanied by his wildly gestural sketches in place of the usual rigid, mathematical plans. The sketches are beguiling in their seeming lack of representation of anything other than the mysteries of Gehry's own imagination. Without the corresponding photos of the finished product, many would be indiscernible as buildings. But a story about Gehry is incomplete without them.

With his shock of white hair and non-angular build, Gehry looks like the manifestation of one of his own sketches. He was born Frank Goldberg in Toronto in 1929 and spent his childhood making "little cities" out of wood scrap with his grandmother. In 1947, the family changed its name and moved to Los Angeles. He took night classes at City College and went on to get his architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1954. Then came several years of flux -- working, serving a stint in the Army and studying urban planning for a year at Harvard before dropping out.

In 1961, he moved his then-wife and two small daughters to Paris, where he worked for architects Pereira and Lickman and spent his weekends traveling to various architectural meccas, including the cathedral at Chartres and his idol Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamps. Upon returning to America in 1962, he set up a practice with another young architect, and then in 1967 founded his current firm, Frank O. Gehry and Associates.

Snubbed by his peers in the early years, Gehry found both approval and companionship among artists. He befriended Kenny Price, Ed Moses and Ron Davis (for whom Gehry built a studio/house) and later collaborated with sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen as well as Richard Serra. Gehry could relate to artists. He told Architectural Record (in an uncharacteristically long interview earlier this year) that he was "intellectually intrigued with their process, their language, their attitudes, their ability to make things with their own hands," whereas with fellow architects, he felt like "an outsider."

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