SEATTLE -- Even with construction workers scrambling to complete the Experience Music Project, this city has already christened it with a nickname: "The Blob."

In Seattle, where art seems to spring from the ground like weeds from sidewalk cracks, it takes a truly audacious design to generate as much attention as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's contribution to the local art scene.

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Architect Frank Gehry's startlingly innovative building has gone a step beyond even his own previous works, creating a building with virtually no straight lines or sharp corners.

Thus far, only members of the media and a few select individuals have been inside of the 140,000-square-foot homage to modern American music. Its grand opening celebration -- a series of concerts, seminars, and public viewings -- is coming this weekend. So almost all the attention has been paid to the exterior structure.

The red-blue-silver-gold-and-iridescent swooping swirl of disparate elements has drawn raves from some quarters and derisive gasps from others, leaving a majority of the city's residents pondering the meaning of it all.

"We have these fear levels introduced here because it's unfamiliar," said Julie Myers, a concept designer and industrial design instructor at the Art Institute of Seattle.

"That unfamiliarity can be very wonderful, and at the same time very unusual and upsetting because it makes you have to confront yourself," Myers said. "The question is: Does the public venture to it, do they like it?"

Inside the building, there is "Roots and Branches," a sculpture by MacArthur Fellow Trimpin, made up of dozens of guitars and other fretted instruments in a two-story-tall funnel shape, wired to a set of sound boards that will let visitors "play" the sculpture.

The Milestones Gallery, reminiscent of a Planet Hollywood or Hard Rock Cafe on steroids, is filled with some of the project's 83,000 artifacts, from Howlin' Wolf's guitar and Elvis Presley's black leather motorcycle jacket to the original photo used for the cover art on Bob Dylan's "Bringin' It All Back Home" album.

"The essential question is, 'What was the vision behind it?' That vision was guided by our founders, Paul Allen and Jody Allen Patton," said Kathy Scanlon, deputy director of the Experience Music Project.

"They picked over a series of eight icons that they wanted to show people here," Scanlon said. "We wanted people to come in and experience music, learn about their creativity. We wanted them to see the roots of rock and roll, something about Jimi Hendrix and those icons."

Rumors that the unorthodox building's shape represented the sound of rock music frozen into a structural form have circulated since the first computer renderings of the building were unveiled months ago.