He is known for his wildly imaginative scribbles and his use of humor in an otherwise humorless medium. Too bad the same can't be said about Forster, Dal Co or even the book's designer. The language is so lecture-worthy you expect to see a test at the end of the chapter. Lengthy passages about other architects, artists, composers and choreographers are painfully egg-headed and tangential, and are not sufficiently reattached to any thesis about Gehry. Part of the problem with both essays is that they assume the reader is well-versed in the history of architecture.
Grand allusions abound, with little or no explanation.
This is unfortunate. Gehry's growing fame and popularity make this a very saleable book, with an ever-expanding, but still relatively green, audience interested in the field. Dal Co's essay is less mind-numbingly dull than Forster's, once he actually starts talking about Frank Gehry. But you have to wade through two and a half pages of his thesis before the first mention of Gehry's name. The photos, plans and sketches are, of course, the actual reason one buys such a document, and in this respect the book is serviceable.