THE BEST DESIGN OF 1997

1 THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO The first great building of the 21st century has turned up a few years early. In the unspectacular Spanish Basque city of Bilbao, architect Frank Gehry has deposited a branch of New York City's Guggenheim Museum of Art that is a tribute to the power of that great contemporary idea, "Stop making sense." Beneath the cocked hats of its undulating towers, the most delightful architectural mind of our time has been everywhere at work. Without stooping to the twee historical quotation of so much postmodern design, Gehry has repudiated Modernist sanctity, symmetry and right-angled geometries in his own fearless way, taking them apart and putting them back together with a rollicking, cockeyed brilliance. Then he dressed this curvaceous beauty in shimmering titanium that is both sexy and unmistakably elegant. (And talk about pounding swords into art galleries: four years ago, on the cheap, Gehry picked up loads of this pricey "strategic" metal when the Russians started dumping their stockpiles.) With this strange masterpiece, a Baroque pearl, modern architecture truly arrives at the status of poetry in motion.

2 Miho Museum I.M. Pei is best known for resounding Modernist statements like the Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. For this project in the hills of a nature preserve near Kyoto, Japan, he chose literal understatement--80% of the main building is belowground. But first he leads visitors along a wooded pathway, through a tunnel and over a cable suspension bridge, an enchanted path to buried art treasures.

3 New Amsterdam Theater When it opened in 1903, it was a showplace on New York City's 42nd Street. In the bump and grind of the years after, both the street and the theater saw hard times. By the 1980s, the New Amsterdam was a wreck. Now, after a wizardly revitalization by Hugh Hardy, one sponsored by the Walt Disney Co., it's back in all its rose-bowered, peacocked, multichromed, Art Nouveau glory.

4 The Getty Center Los Angeles may not be the Athens of America, but it now has its own Acropolis. With a mere $1 billion from the Getty Trust, architect Richard Meier has performed a feat of late-Modernist classicism, a complex of art research, museum and conservation facilities that sits on a hill along the San Diego Freeway, quietly emanating the notion that civilization is whatever it is that produces buildings like these.

5 The Lion King The Broadway audience might have settled for the animated feature plopped directly (and predictably) onstage. But director and costume designer Julie Taymor wanted to create a different kind of fascination. Through puppetry, shadow figures and masks, Taymor makes her Lion King--at the renovated New Amsterdam Theater (see above)--the master of a powerful realm, ancient and African, full of ritual, magic and awe.

6 Mateo's Crib It's baby's first convertible--a rocking cradle that segues neatly into a bassinet. Designed by Alberto Mantilla and Anthony Baxter of Curve I.D., it's intended to rockabye babies between birth and six months. The body, of molded plywood with an ash veneer, rests on a table base of solid ash. It has the simplicity of a Shaker basket with a touch of nursery humor, yet even those smiles are functional handles. Mies van der Rohe himself would smile at that.

7 New York, N.Y. Hotel O.K., it's a hoot, a building that's made to look like a jumble of buildings. This massive Las Vegas hotel with a "Central Park-themed" casino takes as its silhouette the Manhattan skyline and for good measure crams in Grant's Tomb, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Did we mention the Coney Island roller coaster? Tasteless, you say? We say, beyond tasteless. Hey man, you got a problem with that?

8 New York Botanical Garden London's Crystal Palace is gone, but this turn-of-the-century greenhouse in the Bronx is alive and glinting. To restore this sizable jewel box, which showcases an indoor spectacle of plant life, required 17,000 new panes of glass. The firm of Beyer Blinder Belle, which also restored Ellis Island and Grand Central Terminal, gives back to America one more piece of its indispensable but fragile past.

9 The Pillow Book For a film about sexual, romantic and literary obsessions, in which a Japanese woman literally inscribes the book of love across the bodies of men, director Peter Greenaway and his production designers, Wilbert van Dorp and Andree Putman, provide the ultimate in layered looks. Japanese calligraphy cascades down split screens; inserts open within larger images like windows on a computer screen. The visual stringencies of old Japan meet the clutter of the global village. In a word: fascinating.

10 Standup Stapler An idea you grasp right away. The last time the stapler got serious thought was in the 1930s, when objects were streamlined for the machine-age imagination. In the ergonomic '90s, when we design for the body, the Boston stapler still keeps a nice contour. It's as grip-friendly as a handshake, as squeezable as a teddy bear, and better looking than most public sculpture.