Now for something completely different

NEW YORK -- It's a bird! It's a plane!

Well, no, actually it's an Alp. Or an iceberg. Or maybe a clipper ship.

Whatever it is, this is the architecture of metaphor. You're supposed to read meanings into it.

The building in question is the most talked-about new piece of architecture of the year so far. It's the new office building for media mogul Barry Diller, facing the Hudson River at 18th Street, in Manhattan's former Meatpacking District.

The designer is Frank Gehry, doubtless the world's most celebrated architect. Gehry in recent years has been known for glittery buildings in curly metal that look as if they've been flash-frozen in the act of exploding -- the Guggenheim Museum in Spain, for instance, or the marvelous Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Or they look as if they're collapsing, like his Stata Center at MIT.

This one, though, is something very different. It's a cubist mound of whitish glass. It looks as if a snowfall had just descended on a tower of ice cubes.

The building is the world headquarters of the IAC/InterActiveCorp , a conglomerate that controls some 60 businesses around the world, all of which provide some kind of service on the Internet. Barry Diller is a billionaire former Hollywood producer whose interest switched to the Internet 12 years ago.

I love the IAC inside. The whitish glass walls are patterned with dots like snowflakes. At eye level, the glass is clear, so you can look outdoors, but higher and lower the white dots cut sun glare by as much as 90 percent.

The resulting office spaces are utterly delightful, filled with a light that seems almost palpable, bright and white but shadowless. Private offices are separated from common areas by glass partitions that often contain clear panels of color. It always seems to be lightly snowing outside. Walking around these spaces is like walking among your unopened Christmas presents. And details, everywhere, are superbly executed.

The most stunning interior is the lobby, so huge that it includes an LED screen that's 18 feet tall and 120 feet wide. It also boasts a long, snake-shaped wooden bench, custom-designed by Gehry. IAC says the lobby will be used as an art gallery, as well as for community and corporate events.

Of course in a building so oddly shaped, some of the interiors are eccentric. But that seems only to add to an atmosphere of informality. Except for the bosses' floor (the sixth) and an upper-floor coffee bar (the ninth), all the office interiors are by Studios Architecture, not by Gehry.

Outdoors, the building is less successful. The problem isn't so much with the architecture as with what's about to happen around it.

A few years ago, the former Meatpacking District morphed from mostly industrial uses to mostly art galleries and nightclubs. Now it's suddenly morphing again, becoming New York's hottest chunk of real estate. For some reason, rich New Yorkers all seem to want to pile at once into whatever is the latest fad neighborhood -- TriBeCa, Dumbo, wherever.

Aesthetically, Gehry's building wants to stand out as something different. It wants to be an exclamation point on the street and on the skyline. But that isn't going to happen, because other famous architects are busy doing new buildings all around it, most of which will be taller.

French architect Jean Nouvel , the architect of the dreadful new Musée Branly in Paris, has designed a 23-story condo tower, more than double the height of the IAC's 10 floors. It is already rising next door to the north. Its surface resembles a sequined dress -- metaphors again -- with a zillion windows of many sizes, most of them slightly tilted or angled so you'll get the sense of one great wall of glitter. Penthouse condos here are going for up to $22 million.

To the south, right across 18th Street, the American Robert Stern , known in the past for traditional red-brick works like Spangler Hall at the Harvard Business School, is in the process of designing another condo tower. This one will be 30 stories, sheathed in glass and "aluminum in different finishes."

Next door in another direction, noted Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has a building in the works. And at least two other sites, which either abut the IAC property or come very close to it, are expected to be developed soon. Then, less than a block away, the High Line is sparking a further rash of construction, spurred by the fact that this former elevated railroad is being converted into an aerial park designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architects of Boston's fine new ICA.

An IAC staffer says, "There will be an incredible wealth of signature architects" in the area. That's one way of putting it. Another would be that a lot of architects are all competing with one another to create the most iconic of icons. The result could resemble a world's fair of jostling, competing, unrelated pavilions. I don't think Barry Diller and Frank Gehry will end up with the drop-dead work of architecture they had in mind.

The IAC's developer was Joseph Rose of the Georgetown Company, who once chaired the city's Planning Commission. Rose offers some interesting history on the IAC design.

Diller, he says, originally wanted to build across the West Side Highway, directly above the water of the Hudson River. When regulations proved this impossible, he acquired the present site, but insisted to Gehry that the building must have a nautical theme. Gehry's office worked with an Italian firm to create a glass wall where each sheet of glass curves. The curve is created by a process called cold bending, which is done when the glass is placed on the building, not earlier in the factory. The goal was to make the IAC look like billowing white sails.

It doesn't, really. It's too stiff for that. But it's certainly a memorable object, and a wonderful interior workplace. Let's hope it remains both those things when it's crowded among other works of "signature architects."

Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.