From its first placard, the exhibition pulled no punches. There, within corridors that were his own creation, came blunt questions of the man's achievement and legacy:

"Genius? Fraud? Artist? Who is Frank Gehry?"

Such was the introduction to a recent retrospective on Mr. Gehry's long career in architecture and design. The exhibition was held inside the architect's first Ohio building - the sculpture-for-living that is the University of Toledo's Center for the Visual Arts.

Adjoined to the Toledo Museum of Art, the center opened 15 years ago next month as a home to the university's art department and the museum's reference library. Outside the 51,000-square-foot building is an agglomeration of boxy shapes and zig-zagging angles clad in gray lead-coated copper plates.

Mr. Gehry has described the building's skin as a jazz excursion, complete with visual riffs and syncopated rhythms that lift the eye up, then down, then back around. One critic called it "a collision of the Merrimack and the Monitor on the museum's grounds."

It's just such design creativity that lifted Mr. Gehry to the pedestal of the world's most well-known living "starchitect." Yet that iconoclasm has often generated controversy for his projects in Toledo and elsewhere.

Problems elsewhere

Now a lawsuit from one disgruntled client has renewed concerns about whether his buildings' fantastical forms come at the sacrifice of utility and function. It also could renew questions over the prudence of a decision by Toledo museum and university officials to build a smaller but fancier Center for the Visual Arts than was first planned, and that some faculty now say is too small.

Late last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge sued Mr. Gehry and a construction firm for alleged design and construction failures such as leaks, cracks, drainage problems, and mold in the school's $300 million Stata Center, which opened in 2004.

The building is also unique in design, and Mr. Gehry has been quoted by the New York Times as saying how it "looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate."

It was not his first building to encounter problems. Several years earlier, officials at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland noticed a situation with their $62 million Gehry-designed business school. Snow and ice reportedly would slide off the building's sloped roof and onto pedestrians. On sunny days, the building's stainless-steel tiles cooked passers-by with reflected sunlight.

And three years ago, Mr. Gehry agreed to sandblast portions of the then-new $274 million Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles to reduce its glare.

Yet for all of its unconventionality, Toledo's Gehry building is well-liked among those who work there every day and has aged well since opening in December, 1992, according to art department faculty.

"I think form and function are very successfully unified," said Joel Lipman, a longtime UT art and English professor. "It's rare to find a dark or dim or grubby spot in this building."

But there is at least one gripe. Some faculty say the building has reached capacity and is now too small to meet all the art department's needs.

For that problem, there's a Gehry-devised solution, albeit a dated one. Back in the early 1990s, Mr. Gehry made drawings and a scale model for a "Phase II" expansion that would nearly double the Center for the Visual Arts' size with more classroom space and a large auditorium featuring a wedge-like roof.

However, Richard Putney, UT's director of art history, believes it's unlikely that the architect would agree to return to Toledo and carry out the expansion plans now gathering dust in the museum's basement. Mr. Gehry is approaching 80 and is said to be committed to more than a dozen projects.

Mr. Gehry could not be reached for comment late last week.

"I don't think we could get him," said Mr. Putney, who organized this year's Gehry exhibit and was a member of the committee that selected Mr. Gehry in 1989.

At that time, Mr. Gehry was considered world-renowned and had just months before received architecture's most prestigious award, the Pritzker Architecture Prize. His star has only risen since.

In 1997, Mr. Gehry completed the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, a shiny, undulating, titanium-clad visual explosion that's widely considered his marquee work. The building not only propelled Mr. Gehry to near-celebrity status, but also lured flocks of tourists to what was a rusting port city.

Mr. Putney said he recalls how those who planned Toledo's Center for the Visual Arts were aiming to complement the museum's 1912 neoclassical building with a structure that would soar - although at a reasonable price. "There was never any question - there could not be a drab academic building on this campus," he said. "The museum is a world-class museum, and they wanted to get the best architect they could."

All together the center was a $10 million project, with $5.5 million coming from the state and $4.5 million through private donations. The building itself cost slightly more than $7 million, "a real bargain," Mr. Putney said.

The project's leftover funds went to constructing the university's nearby Center for Sculptural Studies, a small factorylike building designed by Mr. Gehry's firm that opened in 1994.

According to Mr. Putney, officials were not expecting the center to come in so under budget and previously had decided to downsize the building from the originally proposed 80,000-square-feet to 51,000 square feet to fit cost constraints - "a little smaller than we certainly all wanted."

However, in an interview Mr. Putney was quick to dismiss the notion that, perhaps in hopes of garnering prestige for UT and Toledo, officials might have chosen to have a star architect do a smaller building rather than have a less showy one with more room to grow.

But one of the project's earliest critics came down against Mr. Gehry for such reasons. That individual was Bruce Douglas, at the time president of UT's board of trustees.

"They have chosen an architect who satisfies his own ego and desire to be noticed," Mr. Douglas told The Blade in 1991. "My complaint is how the cost of it affects the university's ability to run its own programs."

Mr. Douglas, who is now president of Sterling College in Sterling, Kan., declined comment through an assistant.

Without executing Mr. Gehry's old Phase II drawings, UT's art facilities could be expanded by constructing a new satellite building behind the sculptural studies center.

Mr. Putney said this possibility has been discussed among faculty, but there are no formal plans at this time.

On a crisp afternoon recently, the Center for the Visual Arts stood against the verdant edge of the museum's east lawn, a giant Rubik's cube of gray paneling under an overcast sky.

During the building's dedication ceremony 15 years earlier, Mr. Gehry told the audience how the panels eventually would take on a greenish patina - "a hint of mint" to match the stains on the museum's marble. Yet that day is still 85 years away.

"One hundred years from now, it will go slightly green," the architect said. "Of course, probably none of us will be here then, unless we're frozen."

Contact JC Reindl at:

jreindl@theblade.com

or 419-724-6065.

First Published November 25, 2007, 12:15 p.m.