This multi-purpose twin-auditorium home for music, opera, theatre and dance is a double first for Gehry. It is his first East Coast building, and his first in a rural setting. And it is some setting: on the Arcadian wooded slopes of the mid-Hudson valley, 90 miles north of New York City, in a sprawling 600-acre liberal arts college campus, looking across to the smoky outlines of the Catskill Mountains in the distance. The theatre glimmers among the trees and meadows, reflecting the warm spring sunshine, its contours echoing the hills, and doing just what it was meant to do - put Bard College on the map. Had you ever heard of the place? Thought not. Well, you have now. See? It works. That’s why people hire Frank. Frank has international reach.

Everyone denies that this is a case of hunt-the-trophy-architect, however. The Bard people point out that they commissioned Frank back in the mid 1990s, before the Bilbao Guggenheim made him a superstar. Frank tells you that he landed the job because he plays ice hockey and found himself in a game with one of the college trustees and, well, one thing led to another. But posterity will probably say this: that Gehry's creative peak came in a few short years at the end of the 20th century, happily just at the moment when developing computer technology made it possible for people to afford his dreams - which previously would have been insanely costly to build.

Posterity may well also say that three buildings from this period are the best: the Disney concert hall in Los Angeles, his first big competition win in 1988, much refined over the years, and opening this autumn: the Bilbao Guggenheim, a franchised art gallery that became the best-known building in the world when it opened in 1997; and Bard College, the design for which began as Bilbao was finishing. These three show Gehry at his most fluent and fluid, confidently playing the high game of architecture and winning.