Cabela's may have placed Lehi on the map for outdoor enthusiasts, but a project designed by America's architect du jour Frank Gehry could place the city on the world stage.

To be announced Friday, the mixed-use project -- which includes high-end shopping and restaurants, a wakeboard lake, a five-star hotel and convention center, and a residential community -- is the brain child of Brandt Andersen, the 29-year-old majority owner of the NBA Development League for Utah and software entrepreneur.

The project will be located on Andersen's 85-acre property on the east side of Interstate 15 south of Point of the Mountain and north of Cabela's and the proposed Terrace at Traverse Mountain lifestyle center in Lehi. It will be unveiled in its entirety on Jan. 31.

"This is Gehry's first project in Utah," Andersen told the Daily Herald on Wednesday. "If you look at Gehry's projects across the world and the projects he's now working on, he's arguably one of the most creative minds of our time, a complete genius. He designs not around what he loves. He designs with the environment, the surrounding atmosphere and historical features in mind."

The creative mind behind the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Gehry challenges conventional definitions of space and structure in aesthetics and architecture. In 1989, Gehry was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, deemed the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for architecture, said Bill Miller, a professor of architecture with the University of Utah.

Some critics describe Gehry as a master of deconstructivism -- the post-modern movement his work appears to personify but which he disavows any association with, according to Wikipedia.

Pending city approval, construction is scheduled to begin this summer. When completed, the project is expected to generate between 500 and 1,000 new jobs, Andersen said.

"With Thanksgiving Point, Cabela's and now a Gehry-designed development, this is making Lehi a major locus of activity that no one, 15 years ago, could have imagined," said Miller.

"It's like having the Salt Lake Public Library designed by Moshe Safdie," he said. "Doing great architectural work doesn't always have to be in Los Angeles or New York. Small towns are places where you can do interesting buildings. And in this case, this is an interesting project by a forward-thinking developer and a world-renowned architect."

Miller declined to speculate on how the mixed-use project will look.

"But it'll be like Frank Gehry meets Park City log and stone. It won't look like a very large Park City house, but will be more iconic and have a wider range of expression," he said. "Gehry designed housing complexes in Los Angeles early in his career and also designed the Santa Monica Place, a shopping mall. This project will bring his range of experiences together."

Gehry's style is very idiosyncratic and personal, Miller said. "He has developed a direction of architectural expression that yields these unique power forms that are very expressive sculpturally. He's concerned with surfaces, technology and uses a lot of metal because of the sinuous surfaces he creates."

"Utah is not well known for its architectural stature. Gehry will, with our help, create something that will stand as an architectural icon for our state," Andersen said.

In 1999, Andersen founded uSight, a Provo developer of e-Commerce software for small businesses. In 2004, the company was ranked the nation's second-fastest growing privately held company by Inc. Magazine, and a part of uSight was later sold to Kansas City-based NMR Inc. Andersen also was the youngest CEO to make the Inc. list. A Brigham Young University communications graduate, he is the general partner and owner of The Lakes at Sleepy Ridge in Orem.

Ultimately, a Gehry-designed project will be a big traffic generator, Miller said.

"Architecture is a commodity today," Miller said. "Why do major civic institutions go to signature architects? Because they want the power that architect brings to the building. People will come to see the buildings, whether they like it or not. We visit them because it's done by important architects and designers and it shows how they realize their thinking. It helps raise consciousness to see there's life beyond the shopping mall, the normal."