Very varied, inquisitive, lively and wide-ranging

As he approaches his centuryhe was born in 1919it is a pleasure to welcome James Ackermans latest collection of eight very varied essays in Origins, Invention, Revision, and to note that he is as inquisitive, as lively and as wide-ranging as he ever was. His account of the Louis Vuitton Foundation building in the Bois de Boulogne, by Frank Gehry, which opened two years ago after a near-decade gestation, shows him responding more enthusiastically to the latest achievement than he might to some a