The Lewis Library, by architect Frank Gehry, opens this week at Princeton U. Price tag: $74-million, and counting. (Princeton U. images)

There is no doubt that constructing a Frank Gehry building is difficult. The architect is known for curvy and bizarre structures designed on software akin to that used for high-performance sports cars and aircraft. His buildings can bust budgets and schedules. And then comes the question everyone asks after construction of the Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology went awry: Will the building stand up to the weather?

In putting up its new Gehry-designed Lewis Library, Princeton University endured its share of challenges. It constructed models of the building to give the subcontractors a chance to practice. It fired a contractor halfway through the job when the building was past due. It learned that some subcontractors were trying to bribe their way onto the job site.

But more on that later. First, the building — ta-da! For its trouble, the university has gotten a structure that will probably inspire and delight those who work in it. Mr. Gehry’s buildings may seem like jumbles from the outside, but he is known for designing pleasing and impressive interior spaces. The Lewis Library, a science library that supplants branch department libraries across the campus, has them throughout.

Start with an atrium, just inside the front door, that expands to a wide-open space, giving a visitor views of all parts of the building. The walls are painted playful colors of lime, tangerine, and blueberry. The group-study room on the top level is an architectural jewel, looking out on the building’s roofs and the rest of the campus through a prismlike array of windows. A study room called “The Treehouse” lets in light through windows underneath its sloping, irregular roof. Tubular lights that hang vertically in the room make it feel like an alien forest.

The exterior blends with the interior. During a tour last week, Henry Thomas, Princeton’s project manager, told visitors to look through a window and follow the curving line of stainless-steel roof through the glass to the curving wall below. The window frames Fine Hall, an imposing Brutalist tower that stands next to the library. The library has a miniature tower of its own, which houses study spaces decked out with colorful laminated tables made from plywood. These too were designed by Mr. Gehry.

It’s a library that is is all about people and their interactions with technology. If you look around, Mr. Thomas announced at one point in the tour, you’ll notice that there are no books in sight. The bound volumes, which seem to be mainly journal articles from the sciences, are in a drab room in the basement, in high-density storage.

The latest cost estimate for the 87,000-square-foot building is $74-million — and that figure is from 2006. Construction bills are still coming in, said Cass Cliatt, a spokeswoman for Princeton, and the final cost will not be known for several months. The insurance mogul Peter B. Lewis, who has been a longtime friend of Mr. Gehry’s as well as a patron of his projects, covered $60-million. Some years ago, Mr. Lewis also picked up much of the construction cost for Mr. Gehry’s Weatherhead School of Management building at Case Western Reserve University — even after that building blew its budget.

Last week’s tour included a demonstration of the software that the architects and contractors used to design and build the library. It can show cross sections or strip facades off of renderings to show the structure’s bones, which are every bit as complicated as the colliding appearance of the final product suggests. A steel beam that not only curves but also twists under a roof, for instance, is a design element that had to be custom-made by the steel subcontractor. Mr. Thomas said such custom elements might have made subcontractors nervous during the bidding process.

But some, Princeton later learned, were quite eager to get on the job site. During the summer, it was revealed that subcontractors hoping to land jobs on the project had given a construction manager from a private firm nearly $100,000 — and had pledged much more. The subcontractors pleaded guilty when the case came before a U.S. District Court, but prosecutors have not named the firm that the construction manager worked for.

Ms. Cliatt said Princeton was working with Skanska, the contracting giant, at the time the bribery occurred. Princeton knew nothing of the bribery when it released Skanska from the project in November 2006, the year the library was originally scheduled to open. “We released [Skanska] because the project was not proceeding as we hoped,” she said. “One of the factors was that the project was behind schedule.” Princeton is now doing its own investigation the bribery charges — it’s not clear if the bribery added cost to the building — and is considering legal action on its own.

In a statement, Skanska said that the employee who took the bribes no longer works for the company and that the incident was “isolated” and “involving one individual.”

The Lewis Library opens nearly a year after MIT filed a lawsuit against Mr. Gehry, charging that his Stata Center had design flaws that has caused the building to leak and deteriorate. Princeton took no chances during construction, hiring consultants and specialty inspection services to examine the waterproofing and exterior elements of the building, looking for trouble. Part of that process included spraying the building with fire hoses and checking for leaks.

Mr. Thomas said that Princeton was “ultrasensitive” to quality control during the construction of the Lewis Library. “We have lots of different detail conditions that are potentially problematic because they are not standard,” he said.

It was those details that led the project’s construction manager, early on, to hire a dozen subcontractors to build a 20-foot-tall mock-up of a portion of the building where Mr. Gehry had specified some particularly difficult connections. The mock-up let the subcontractors work out the construction process before attempting the real thing. Mock-ups are sometimes built on other sites to examine finishes, Mr. Thomas said, but this was much more involved.

He wouldn’t say what building the mock up added to the cost of the building. But he did say this: “I can share with you that it was worth every penny.” —Scott Carlson

The Lewis Library, a science library, has scarcely any books in public areas. Spaces for people and technology dominate.