The guest editors' covers of our October issue

Two towering figures of contemporary architecture loom over our October guest editors issue (W*187). Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel top the wish list of anyone plotting a grand project, with CVs already packed with modern icons and plenty more in the pipeline. But for all their success, the pair remain outspoken, maverick outsiders, constantly questioning what public architecture could and should be. The perfect Wallpaper* guest editors then.

In the issue, Gehry talks Alice Rawsthorn through a career that has seen him shift from a satellite of the LA art scene in the 1960s and 1970s to the man trusted by the Walt Disney Corp to design its downtown concert hall and the city of Bilbao to transform its international image. In both cases the trust was well placed. Gehry also takes us on a exclusive walk through his remarkable Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, opening this October, while architectural historian Kurt W Forster looks at the future of the remarkable Gehry archive, packed with the architect's famous cardboard box and sticky tape 'sketches'.

Meanwhile, Nouvel (below) transports us first to his summer retreat in the South of France for an untempered, but never ill-tempered, take on the trials and tribulations of building big and clever and then presents a photographic tour of projects past, present and future, from the Fondation Cartier to massive works in-progress such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the National Museum of Qatar and the Philharmonie de Paris.

Wallpaper's October issue is the seventh guest editor's edition. Previous part-time editors include Jeff Koons, Hedi Slimane, Dieter Rams, Zaha Hadid, Louise Bourgeois, Rei Kawakubo, Karl Lagerfeld, Philippe Starck, David Lynch, Robert Wilson, Kraftwerk, Christian Marclay, Ole Scheeren, Lang Lang, Taryn Simon, Elmgreen & Dragset and Laurie Simmons.  

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