The shapes—of the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao, of the unbuilt New York Times
headquarters, of Los Angeles's Walt Disney Concert Hall—are by now familiar, if no less wonderful and estranging. This terrific book can hardly be called a set of sketches. It brings together drawings architect Gehry has done for 29 recent projects; to look at them in series is to watch a genius think out loud, so close does the link between thought and line seem here (before the projects have been computer simulated, modeled and hyped to death). Text-wise, signs are sometimes taken as wonders, with Gehry's most banal pronouncements given the status of pull-quotes ("We work with clients a lot. I listen to the client a lot. I spend more time with clients than most people would guess"), but the drawings themselves (950!) are arresting, and they lose none of their impact when put on the page. (Mar.)
