“This is a very hippy area round here,” said one of the college academics tolerantly, casting scarcely a glance at this comely Hudson Valley Godiva. “You’ve got to remember that Woodstock’s not so far away.” Meanwhile Craig Webb, project architect from Gehry’s office, was staring hard not at the nude lady but at the gnomic banner she and her friends were displaying. “Tuition not foil” it read. “Tinfoil” would have sloganised better, but Craig instantly recognised the reference to the rippling stainless-steel carapace of Frank’s $62m new building. It seemed the student ingrates thought it was a waste of money. “I gotta talk to these guys,” muttered Craig, dashing off. But the college authorities, true to the spirit of Woodstock, took no action. The students soon waved amiably and left, and the audience of, ahem, breadheads, most nostalgically approving of this act of defiance, trooped in to hear Mahler’s Third. I had been witness to an American tradition as venerable as saluting the flag.

Gehry too is, these days, an American tradition. One almost forgets just how dangerously radical his architecture once seemed, what a fringe Californian figure he was until barely a decade ago. But sensation-seeking architecture groupies quickly moved on. It is now fashionable to sneer at Bilbao, at Frank’s architecture-as-sculpture thing. Gehry, the classic late developer, is now 74. His first British building - the little “Maggie’s Centre” in Dundee, a cancer care hospice named after his late friend Maggie Jencks - opens this September. “When did we start the Bard project?” he asks Craig. “1996?” He seems appalled. “God - I’m going to be dead before you know it.” Despite this doomy beginning, Gehry’s humour slowly improves as we talk in the main auditorium of Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.