$62m might seem a lot for a small department of a (numerically) small college, and it’s a sizeable building - containing studios and teaching rooms for dance and drama as well as the 900 seat main house with its full-sized stage, and the 300-seater “black box” adaptable theatre space. But Gehry had to make some economies. All those rippling stainless steel scales clad the front and sides of the building only. “The back of the house is the back of house” offers Frank, and so it is. Go round the back, and suddenly the illusion is revealed. You’re looking at nondescript square blocks, painted white. That’s hard up against the woodland fringe of the site. Nobody goes round there. But things inside the foyer are pretty basic, too: exposed off-the-peg ductwork, basic concrete floors, the bare minimum of plasterwork, the unadorned latticework underside of that bravura exterior shell. “Would we have pushed it further if we’d had more money?” ponders Frank. “I doubt it. We wanted to keep that matter-of-fact industrial quality.”