In fact, the quirky white-walled, crinkly-roofed building with its turret room looking out over the Firth of Tay may become a bit too well known. Its administrators are beginning to wonder if they will have to stop architecture pilgrims getting in the way of the patients. Because the building is the third of an accelerating series of "Maggie's Centres", named after the late Maggie Keswick Jencks, a cancer victim whose idea they were. They are essentially friendly clubs offering support and advice to patients undergoing treatment. This is, however, the first such centre to take the landmark-architecture route. There will be others by Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers and so on, which will no doubt help to raise the profile and ease the fund-raising. Gehry knew Maggie and her husband, the architectural theorist Charles Jencks, well. So he agreed to design the Dundee building as a memory of his friend, and waived his fee as well.

It is very typical of Gehry's Quixotic way of doing things that his first UK building should be no landmark cultural complex, but something as intensely personal as this. And he has worked away on it - the building was redesigned more than once as he fretted over getting the details right, concerned that he might do something too fancy, too inappropriate for his old friend. At another moment - given that the building has a tower - he started to worry that it might end up looking like a church, which would maybe not be the ideal image in the circumstances. Working with models rather than drawings as he always does, bending card and folding paper, eventually he arrived at a form which satisfied him.