One foggy summer evening amid the delightful garbage bars of San Francisco's Outer Richmond district, I watched a shot glass sail past my head when Annie Lennox's (rapturous! transcendent! holy, holy!) "Walking on Broken Glass" surfaced for the fourth near-consecutive time.
(Piano was born into a family of Genoan builders; his Astrup Fearnely Museum, on the water in Oslo, resembles a giant glass sail).
Then there are the glass sails.
Then the metaphors mix, go from natural to nautical, and the glass sails come into the story.
Will billowing glass sails and crumpled sheets of titanium soon be making an appearance on the riverbank?
Dubbed the "glass cloud" and likened by some to a spaceship, this venue is a jumble of 12 glass "sails" cradling a $130m £82mmuseumeumuseum
It is a far cry from the eye-wateringly expensive museums he has built recently, with their double-curved glass sails hanging as monuments to their patron's vanity.
Unlike the look-at-me klaxon call of Frank Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which trumpets the invasion of the luxury brand into the contemporary art world by flouncing its billowing glass sails above the Bois de Boulogne, you might not even notice the Fondazione Prada.
Back in 2006, Gehry pointed at his squiggly sketches and told the Guardian that when the building was finished he wanted young people to look at it and say: "What is that?" On Friday, as the sun gleamed off the gigantic glass "sails" partially open to the elements, a group of youngsters strolling along the road to the Bois de Boulogne stopped to take photographs.
Cranes will rise in Barcelona, New York, Jerusalem, Las Vegas, Abu Dhabi, Paris and other world centers to construct glass sails, wavy monoliths, bristly multiheaded towers and other alter-the-skyline-forever structures designed by a spectacled, white-haired 78-year-old working out of a bullpen with cardboard furniture in West Los Angeles.
Finally, "Look who's coming!" We all look and there is Jack, on the other side of the glass, sailing in our direction, looking at us looking at him, eyes that stay fastened as he moves.
