Today, it’s different for architects such as Gehry, whose late work has been compared to sculpture and who has been called the Michelangelo of his age. Such comparisons imply that he alone is the final arbiter of each curve and arc. His late work recalls James Stirling’s calling Ronchamp “a masterpiece of a unique and most personal order.” As opposed to Mies’s right-angled vocabulary of construction, which created a school of followers, Gehry’s work even now is untouchable in its hermetic formulas, however open and approachable it is for the public.

After the enormous success of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Gehry produced Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., and the Guggenheim New York, all variations on a theme. What if, after Ronchamp, churches all wanted similar solutions? Of course, Le Corbusier himself extended the vocabulary of Ronchamp in his church at Firminy, France, and at Chandigarh. Since Bilbao, has Gehry been mining a similarly rich vein of form?