The Globe and Mail

The 2001 retrospective of Frank Gehry's work at New York's Guggenheim Museum was a sumptuous feast, with massive back-lit photographs and hundreds of models paraded along the ramps of the spiralling rotunda and into two of its towers. For the event, Frank O. Gehry & Associates suspended huge swaths of aluminum mesh from the ribs of the rotunda's skylight; a titanium-clad canopy (actually, a detail borrowed from a Gehry-designed winery hotel in Spain) was installed to define a café on one of the sculpture terraces. The exhibition belonged to New York's era as a seemingly invincible capital of capitalism and culture: Enron was one of the chief sponsors of the event and there was tremendous impetus to build a monumental new Guggenheim in lower Manhattan -- Frank Gehry's designs for a roiling creative factory took centre stage at the retrospective. But, seven days after the retrospective closed, two planes were flown into the World Trade Center, rocking the society's tectonic plates along the way.