Frank Gehry, architect of the much-lauded Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, was awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture recently in the early 17th-century splendour of the Banqueting Hall in London's Whitehall. At 71, the Canadian-born architect has been around for some time, slowly evolving a style of architecture that is as curvaceous, as theatrical, and apparently as wilful as, say, the Baroque masters of the 17th century in Rome.
In fact, one might say that Gehry is a Baroque architect of the turn of the 21st century. And, given that his most recently completed building is the Experience Music Project in Seattle, designed in the guise of what appears to be a melted-down, cherryred Fender Stratocaster, Baroque 'n' roll is a label that suits him: full-blast, irreverent and, for the most part, pretty wonderful.
His architecture is rightly popular among clients, who have proved to be remarkably catholic in their taste, and among a global public ever more greedy for sensation. Gehry really is of the moment: he has been conjuring the kind of fantastic architecture that global-brand-era capitalism feels it needs. In the same way, the glorious extravaganzas of Bernini, Borromini and Guarani gave the Roman Catholic church a shot in the surplice at the outset of the 17th century.
Then the great religion was, in Latin countries, that of the one, true, universal church; 400 years on it is consumerism, leisure and their offspring, culture, as housed in thriving and ostentatious new galleries and museums. Where Borromini's curvaceous churches and Bernini's unashamedly erotic sculpture The Ecstasy of St Theresa (at the Capella Cornaro, St Maria della Vittoria, Rome) were designed covertly to inflame the excitement and ultimately the loyalty of the wealthy faithful, Gehry's exotic designs help keep the idea going that a collusion of ultra-wealth and culture is the high point of our society.
In his acceptance speech, Gehry avoided pretty much all mention of the Bilbao Guggenheim; it has become almost too famous, the architectural equivalent of Frank Sinatra's My Way. Yet this truly iconic building - an icon of the capitalism-into-culture equation - has proved to be massively popular. It has whipped in the crowds and helped funnel investment into the Basque capital, most of it from the private sector.
What Bernini did for Rome at the height of the Counter-Reformation, Gehry has done in the design of one building, for Bilbao.
Gehry's finest buildings are nearly all the products of private enterprise at its most confident. The Experience Music Project, which opened in June, was financed by Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire. The Guggenheim was a gift to Bilbao from the coffers of a New York plutocrat made rich decades ago on Yukon gold. Gehry's other European contributions - the Vitra design museum in Weil-am-Rhein, the Maggie Jencks cancer care centre in Dundee, the Marques de Riscal winery and hotel in Elciego (due to open in 2003) and the Neue Zollhof waterfront development in Dusseldorf - are the ripe fruit of wealthy private patrons or development corporations comfortably fed by big business. Gehry's effervescent approach to design will no doubt similarly appeal to a new generation of successful dot com entrepreneurs. As capitalism goes into a kind of baroque overdrive, so the architecture that frames it has become increasingly flamboyant, from the casino strips of Las Vegas, through the profitable Po-Mo kitsch of Canary Wharf and New York's Battery Park, to the extravagant new wave of shopping malls, museums and galleries that have become part and parcel of the entertainment industry.
This said, Gehry rarely fails to delight and, just as you can't look at a 17th-century Roman Baroque church without thinking of the horrors of the Inquisition that lurked behind its whimsical split pediments and cutesy cherubs, so it is impossible not to revel in Gehry's irreverent artistry without thinking of the sheer might of the global industries that increasingly fuel this and other architecture like it. Like a successful advertising agency wooing a large public with controversial images and slogans, Gehry is, for all his outward flamboyance, a rationalist at heart. Just like the Baroque masters.
Recently, in a quiet, self-deprecating talk, Gehry said that, although he owed much to computer programming to help with the construction of his apparently convoluted buildings, he still believed in the primacy of good old-fashioned model-making and the messy process of down-to-earth building. Most of the audience at the gold medal award would have been well aware of Gehry's roots as a clean-cut, four-square Modernist who learned to find his own language, one that does for modern museums and business institutions what that dress did for Elizabeth Hurley.
It is harder, of course, to imagine Gehry being invited to let rip in Little England. His taste may be rather too Las Vegas for London, Liverpool or Leeds. When British architects did go Baroque - in the late 17th century with Wren, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh and co - their style, with the exception of Vanbrugh, who had travelled extensively, was far more chaste than that of their Latin counterparts. This is partly because they were building for a Protestant establishment and partly a question of gentlemanly restraint.
Significantly, these architects took their cue from Inigo Jones (1573-1652), the unrepentantly Catholic architect who designed the peerless Banqueting Hall under whose lavish ceiling Gehry received his gold medal. Jones, a designer of court masques, had spent several years in Italy, notably in Venice, but although surrounded by increasingly voluptuous new churches and palaces, he believed that architecture "should be solid, proportional according to the rules [of the classical orders], masculine and unaffected". Yet his revolutionary buildings - and, above all, the Banqueting House in the heart of half-timbered Jacobean London - would have been as shockingly new when completed in 1622 as Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim was to be 375 years later.
What if Gehry were to receive a major commission in these islands? Would the spirit of Jones and Wren lure him into a quieter, Protestant Baroque? Possibly. Certainly the medal ceremony, despite the fleshy excess of the Rubens ceiling billowing above the audience, remained a cosily low-key English affair. No massive, US-style prize money, no extravagant speeches; just a school prize-day atmosphere, in which a small, white-haired septuagenarian mumbled through an address that belied what he has been doing outside the Portland stone walls of the Banqueting Hall - creating some of the most theatrical and in-your-face architecture this side of Bernini.