Brighton's Towering Makeover from Frank Gehry

Brightons Towering Makeover from Frank Gehry
The Regency seafront of Brighton and Hove has seen nothing like this since the mad oriental domes of the Royal Pavilion in the early 19th century.

Now the Sussex seaside city, always torn between gentility and decadence, is about to get a 21st-century equivalent.

Frank Gehry, the architect responsible for Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, will unveil the final designs for his first big British project — a �290m confection of billowing seaside apartment towers and multicoloured pleasure dome.

Canadian-born Gehry has been one of the world’s most in-demand architects since his startling titanium-clad design for the Guggenheim turned industrial Bilbao into a worldwide tourist destination in 1997.

The equally daring 2003 Disney concert hall in his adopted Los Angeles confirmed his global reputation.

His only work here is Maggie’s, a small cancer-care centre in Dundee, which opened in 2003.

Gehry designed it for free.

If his seaside scheme gets the nod from the planners — John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, may call it in for scrutiny — then Brighton and Hove, these days a boom city rather than a fading resort, will have a new architectural icon.

Built on the site of what is at present the run-down King Alfred leisure centre on the Hove end of the seafront, it will cover more than four