Come in Frank Gehry, your time is up

You can just imagine how disappinted I was to hear that for purveyor of egregious architectural megalomania Frank Gehry, 2008 was something of an annus horribilis.

"For years the architect has been lauded for ushering in a new cultural era," says Nancy McDonald in Maclean's magazine. "But the climate appears to be shifting... Either the guy's a genius, or he has us all fooled."

This is only a partially rhetorical question.  As Robert Tracinski noted a while back: 

For a man feted as the greatest living architect, Gehry's style is surprisingly one-note. Almost all of his buildings look like giant piles of crumpled tin foil. Their most interesting feature -- the interior spaces tend to be giant blank boxes -- is an exterior cladding of titanium sheets folded into wild, discombobulated shapes. These are supposedly works of "abstract sculpture," but in fact they are carefully designed to achieve a specific effect: not to look elegant or graceful, but to look jumbled, chaotic, nonsensical. . .

Nonsense only sells for so long.  Turns out that you really can only fool some of the people some of the time.