Location: Seattle, Washington, USA
Date: opened in 2000
Architect: Frank Gehry
Purpose: Museum of music history
Rating: 
(93 votes, average: 3.74 out of 5)
More info: Experience Music Project(EMP) was founded by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. It is a museum of music history sited near the Space Needle and is by one of the two stops on the Seattle Center Monorail, which runs through the building. The museum contains mostly rock memorabilia and technology-intensive multimedia displays. The structure is also home to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. Designed by Frank Gehry, the building resembles many of his firm’s sheet-metal construction works, such as Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Walt Disney Concert Hall and Gehry Tower. The structure contains 140,000 square feet (13,000 m2), with a 35,000-square-foot (3,300 m2) footprint.
Herbert Muschamp (New York Times architecture critic) described it as “something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died.” Forbesmagazine called it one of the world’s 10 ugliest buildings.
(Image credits: 1: drocpsu 2: harry_nl, 3: ehpien )
