incredible shrinking genius; Frank Gehry and Tiffany's are making beautiful jewelry together.

Byline: Sally Singer

The problem with being me," said the architect Frank Gehry, "is that you inevitably start repeating yourself. People want Bilbao, and I don't want to do it." He was sitting at a table in his glass-walled office, looking out at his vast design studio, in which 150 or so cool, bespectacled hipsters (somewhat younger versions of their cool, bespectacled 77-year-old leader) were tinkering with cardboard and silver-paper models of Manhattan residential high-rises, Swiss drug-company headquarters, an Alzheimer's-research center for Las Vegas, a Cuervo tequila museum bound for Guadalajara. None of these future projects closely resembled Gehry's majestic and witty Spanish masterpiece-or indeed his Los Angeles bauble, the Walt Disney Concert Hall-but they all bore his signature: freehand sculptural gestures, textural playfulness, and grand, grand scale. He picked up a coin-size carved wooden fish and felt its weight in his palm: "Something that throws a monkey wrench into the process is good."

In 2002, Tiffany & Co. threw that wrench. The New York institution asked the architect to collaborate on a collection of jewelry and tableware, the first new collection for Tiffany's since Paloma Picasso signed on to render her hearts and kisses in silver 26 years ago. (Picasso followed Elsa Peretti, whose Diamonds by the Yard debuted in disco-centric 1974.) It was a rather original-to put it mildly-idea: Could the aesthetic preoccupations of a designer renowned for monumental structures be miniaturized? Could the glamour of Bilbao be rendered in an earring? Michael Kowalski, Tiffany's highly imaginative CEO, sees the collaboration thus: "It's not about miniaturized architecture; it's about great design. Jewelry is one of the most intimate and personal art forms. We have long considered inviting a new artist to create jewelry for Tiffany. The problem is that Tiffany is an enormous stage, perhaps the most enormous stage in jewelry." As for Gehry, the architect remembered being intrigued by the invitation from a company that he saw as "stodgy in a comfortable sort of way; predictable in a sense that you know what it is and you know what's there." And then he added, "They are an icon and don't need to, but have chosen to, play with another icon."

Play is what has transpired. For more than three years, Gehry has met every six weeks with Jon King, Tiffany's senior vice president in charge of merchandising, and a team of nine jewelry designers. They ask the architect to identify his favorite aspects of his buildings; he does so (a sculpture of a horse head from the DG Bank headquarters in Berlin, a plan for overlapping timber beams for his own not-yet-built dream house, an angle from the forthcoming Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, et cetera) but then, with characteristic charming self-deprecation, rattles off his regrets as well ("GFT asked me to do an exhibit in Florence; they'd seen the fish lamps. I made a wooden fish: Jonah and the whale. Very kitsch. I hated it. Cut off the head, cut off the tail. It was ...