No matter that the Gehry style is now so familiar: the Bard building is a virtuoso piece. No matter that its details have an industrial, over-engineered crudeness to them close up, particularly inside - that’s deliberate, that’s what he does. There is a twinge of disappointment that the auditoria beneath that glistening skin are so conventional when one might have expected something akin to a dragon’s lair, but then you remember that Frank is in reality a very pragmatic architect. His background, before he struck out on his own in his fifties, was a career working for mainstream commercial architects. The insides of his buildings work. Indeed, to my ears the acoustic of the main auditorium, developed with acoustician Yahusita Toyota, is almost too perfect, too bright. This soundscape offers no hiding place for a poor musician, which in a college is no bad thing. Bard runs a successful public summer music festival, but the rest of the time this place is for the students of performing arts. If they have limitations, they will quickly learn them.