They also correspond, in my opinion, to the two great constitutive elements of architecture itself which in his postmodern manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi disengages from the tradition in order to reformulate the tasks and vocation of the newer aesthetic: namely, the opposition between the façade (or store front) and the shed behind or the barnlike space of the building itself. But Gehry does not remain within this contradiction, playing each term off against the other to produce some interesting but provisional solution. Rather, it seems to me that the corrugated metal front and the tumbling cube allude to the two terms of this dilemma, which they attach to something else -- the remains of the older house, the persistence of history and the past: a content which can still be seen through the newer elements, literally, as when the simulated window opening of the corrugated wrapper discloses the older windows of the frame house behind them.

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