For all his insistence on not dwelling in the past, Mr. Gehry allows a few fond recollections. One of the details he loves most in his old house is a large, asymmetrical skylight that breaks through a corner of the dining room, framing a view of an enormous pine tree. At night, the glass panels pick up fragments of unexpected views - a light left on in the yard, his wife drifting though the living room.

Here, that detail is harnessed for an entire building. The structure's fractured glass skin will refract images of the trees and houses outside and of people moving around inside, like an indoor-outdoor hall of mirrors. Mr. Gehry plans to blur the boundary between the private and public realms by creating a series of mechanized glass panels that open like garage doors.

It is as if someone had taken a hammer to the pure abstract forms of Mr. Johnson's famous house. Glass here is as much about illusion as about transparency, suggesting that daily existence consists of multiple mutable realities.