Because it’s Frank Gehry‘s 80th year on this planet, we expect no slow down in story volume and that we’ll continue to hear talk about him for the rest of the year. Just giving you fair warning is all. And even if it weren’t such a milestone birth year for him, with the recent news that he’d landed the commission to work down the street from David Adjaye on the new Eisenhower Memorial, he’d likely be all over the place anyway. So following some of the initial “why’d you hire a flashy starchitect to design a memorial to a non-flashy guy?” talk when the commission was announced, the local paper, the Washington Post, has put together some commentary on the project saying that perhaps Gehry’s unconventional designs are just what Washington D.C. desperately needs to make everyone start rethinking how our “important and historical stuff” should look like:

If he can reinvent memorialization in this city of tombs and museums and memory gardens, his career and legacy will have taken another spin on the wheel, this time in the right direction. He deserves the freedom to try.

Also of note in this Wide World of Gehry, the LA Times presented both an excerpt of Barbara Isenberg‘s new book of interviews Conversations With Frank Gehry as well as a review of it by Christopher Hawthorne who was surprised that the book was “rich and even, at times, revelatory” despite his initial reservations.