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Pink Floyd was playing on the loudspeaker of the ferry transporting us over the Rio Napo into the 2,700-square-mile Yasuni National Park in the Amazon basin in Ecuador’s El Oriente region. We had missed the previous ferry after making hours of slow progress over rutted roads through a largely denuded countryside, then had to kill an hour in a shoreside scene of extreme informality—hot sun, muddy, littered paths along the river, lazing dogs, scattered houses, a little shop, and a dirt parking lot for waiting vehicles. The scene on the other side, however, was more like Guantanamo. From the dock,

The roadways slashing through the rain forest instigate both extraction and attraction, becoming the medium for still larger territorial reorganization. As roads are built, forest is cleared to make way for three rows of agricultural plots, each 820 by 6,562 feet, creating a space 7.5 miles wide and, in aggregate, hundreds of miles long, a vast linear settlement occupied by colonos from elsewhere in the country—well over a quarter million have poured into Oriente since the discovery of oil. Much of this is pasture land: rain-forest soils are a poor basis for conventional agriculture, and clearing the jungle dooms the

When Frank Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT opened three years ago, it got a lot of press, especially for its novel appearance. I wrote at the time [record, July 2004, page 61]: “It looks as if it’s about to collapse. Columns tilt at scary angles. Walls teeter, swerve, and collide in random curves and angles. Materials change wherever you look: brick, mirror-surface steel, brushed aluminum, brightly colored paint, corrugated metal. Everything looks improvised, as if thrown up at the last moment.” The Stata was even pictured in a Doonsbury comic strip, where a character calls it “pretty cool.” Photography: ©

Fractals are the Stata. No two places are exactly the same: “The lack of repetition animates the building.” Coffee and whiteboards seem to be everywhere, and people casually join discussions as they navigate their way through the plan: “You run into people you might not have seen in years. I get lost all the time.” Photography: © Roland Halbe Interiors provide a variety of spaces to gather. A voice of mild disagreement is that of Noam Chomsky, the linguist and political activist who is the Stata’s best-known inhabitant. Chomsky’s world isn’t fractal. It’s a conventional suite of offices. He says

Once upon a time, Le Corbusier sat in his single-room office alone, pencil in hand, solemnly pondering an architectural problem, “face to face with himself, the wrestling of Jacob and the Angel within the human soul,” as he explained in volume eight of Oeuvres Complètes. About one project he wrote, “This took a long time to develop, the design worked upon and caressed in days of perfect calm.” His famous dictum was “creation is a patient search.” Each new edition of the Oeuvres Complètes was eagerly anticipated, and although it would come out only every few years with a limited

Today, it’s different for architects such as Gehry, whose late work has been compared to sculpture and who has been called the Michelangelo of his age. Such comparisons imply that he alone is the final arbiter of each curve and arc. His late work recalls James Stirling’s calling Ronchamp “a masterpiece of a unique and most personal order.” As opposed to Mies’s right-angled vocabulary of construction, which created a school of followers, Gehry’s work even now is untouchable in its hermetic formulas, however open and approachable it is for the public. After the enormous success of the Guggenheim in Bilbao,