This is a deeply, deeply irritating book. It presents three lectures (certainly not conversations) that Spanish star architect/engineer Caltrava gave in 1997. In these he presents his own highly idiosyncratic work, where structural form generally represents the crystallisation of a gesture, with the gestural logic taking precedence over spatial function or engineering common sense.

The book has a few illustrations, but these are poorly reproduced and exclude many of the original lecture slides. The text is also severely cut down from the original lectures, so although it does give some insight into Caltrava's philosophy, it is just far too brief. Although there are 112 pages, only about half have any text.

For the full version of the lectures, plus a far more comprehensive set of slides and associated multimedia, go to http://web.mit.edu/civenv/Calatrava/ ( )