Frank Gehry quotes:

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  • I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.

  • Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

  • The best advice I've received is to be yourself. The best artists do that.

  • Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

  • Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.

  • Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.

  • I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.

  • Architecture is a service business. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.

  • When I went to Harvard and studied planning, I found I didn't have the skills or the strength to become the kind of public person who could go out and lobby government agencies.

  • On certain projects, on big public projects, people definitely are interested in making them greener, but on smaller projects with tight budgets it can be harder.

  • A lot of people don't get it, but I design from the inside out so that the finished product looks inevitable somehow. I think it's important to create spaces that people like to be in, that are humanistic.

  • For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it.

  • The present is filled with flotsam and irony and chaos and disorder in all arenas, political and sociological. I think we have to work in the present even if it's awkward, even if it's not necessarily good, even if we don't understand it ourselves. You only find out 10, maybe 20 years later what was going on.

  • There is stuff I would have liked to have done. But there are no sour grapes.

  • And I realized, when I'd come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time.

  • A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can't stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can't live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff - mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.

  • I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.

  • I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.

  • Green issues have been used as a marketing tool. Sometimes these green claims are completely meaningless.

  • It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

  • There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.

  • My father probably - he had flashes of creativity - he used to do store windows for fruit stores that he worked in and stuff.

  • I work from the inside out.

  • Well, I've always just - I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head.

  • I never said I was opposed to the LEED program or to green building - I'm not.

  • Democracy, obviously, is something we don't want to give up, but it does create chaos. It means the guy next door can do what he wants, and it creates a collision of thinking. In cities, that means people build whatever they want.

  • Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.

  • I refuse to work unless I get paid, so I don't get a lot of work sometimes.

  • There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.

  • My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and I became truck drivers for different companies.

  • I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going.

  • I used to sketch - that's the way I thought out loud. Then they made a book of my sketches, and I got self-conscious, so now I don't do it much.

  • The game is if the orchestra can hear each other, they play better. If they play better and there's a tangible feeling between the orchestra and the audience, if they feel each other, the audience responds and the orchestra feels it.

  • Your work may be great and not make its way into the big picture... like Van Gogh... so who's to say what's good and bad?

  • If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it.

  • I don't make things with my hands, although I studied woodworking and made furniture.

  • There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling.

  • Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.

  • You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

  • I make a model of the site. There are some obvious things: where the entrance should be, where the cars have to go in. You start to get the scale of it. You understand the client's needs, and what the client is hoping for and yearning for.

  • Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously.

  • I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.

  • When I was a kid, my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also.

  • An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.

  • My only extravagance in life is my sailboat. I'm bonkers about that, but other than that, I don't spend money on myself.

  • You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.

  • I was in Peru and visited a building near Lima built by the Incas. It was low in height, with no windows at all, but all the way in the back there was air movement. And I couldn't figure out how they'd done it; it was incredible.

  • Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert.

  • We should celebrate variety rather than conformity and allow people to express themselves. That we don't is more of our denial.

  • Architecture is a small piece of this human equation, but for those of us who practice it, we believe in its potential to make a difference, to enlighten and to enrich the human experience, to penetrate the barriers of misunderstandin g and provide a beautiful context for life's drama.

  • I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do.

  • Creativity is about play and a kind of willingness to go with your intuition. It's crucial to an artist. If you know where you are going and what you are going to do, why do it? I think I learned that from the artists, from my grandmother, from all the creative people I've spent time with over the years.

  • People ask me if I'm an artist or an architect. But I think they're the same.

  • That's what you have to find in architecture. You have to find your signature. When you find it, you're the only expert on it. People can say they like it or don't like it. They can argue about it, but it's yours.

  • I didn't have any interest in doing rich people's homes. I still don't.

  • We have always created - music, literature, art, dance. The art around us - or lack of it - may be a measure of how we're doing as individuals and as a civilization, so maybe we should be worried.

  • Not every person has the same kinds of talents, so you discover what yours are and work with them.

  • In the end, the character of a civilization is encased in its structures.

  • We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.

  • Take what comes your way. Do the best with it. Be responsible as you can and something good will happen...

  • If you know where it's going, it's not worth doing.

  • You have to be optimistic. I still have doubts and conflicts, but the bottom line is, I believe in the future.

  • I know I draw without taking my pen off the page. I just keep going, and that my drawings I think of them as scribbles. I don't think they mean anything to anybody except to me, and then at the end of the day, the end of the project, they wheel out these little drawings and they're damn close to what the finished building is and it's the drawing...

  • I found the material that people hated the most and used the most. So, I was going and try and see if I could play with it sculpturally.

  • I think you've got to accept that certain things are in process that you can't change, that you can't overwhelm. The chaos of our cities, the randomness of our lives, the unpredictability of where you're going to be in ten years from now - all of those things are weighing on us, and yet there is a certain glimmer of control. If you act a certain way, and talk a certain way, you're going to draw certain forces to you.

  • Your best work is your expression of yourself.

  • You can look anywhere and find inspiration.

  • A new idea is obsolete in seconds, right? I just said it and now it's obsolete.

  • One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

  • I love working. I don't know what the word vacation means.

  • That's where you have to look for your inspiration. Don't separate the rest of your life - who you are, what you love - from your work.

  • Everything - design and technology and materials - has changed since the World Trade Center was built. A lot of it has to do with computers, which allow us to be far more efficient as well as structurally sound.

  • Childhood play is nothing more than an expression of our individuality and preparation for human interaction.

  • The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself.

  • Cardboard is another material that's ubiquitous and everybody hates, yet when I made furniture with it everybody loved it.

  • Let the experience begin!

  • In the Renaissance there wasn't a distinction. Bernini was an artist and he made architecture, and Michelangelo also did some great architecture.

  • When I start my class I ask the students to write their signatures on pieces of paper and put them on a table. I have them look at them, and I point out, "They're all different, aren't they? That's you, that's you, that's you, that's you."

  • My father always told me that I was going to be a failure - I think he was more talking about himself, but I didn't know it at the time.

  • I found myself starting architecture with a deep social, Jewish, liberal conscience, and the belief that architecture is for the people. It was a do-gooder base; I was born and raised that way. I was for blacks, whites, Italians, Poles, whatever.

  • Time is just a blur for me. I don't know what - I don't even know where I am sometimes.

  • There's a drive in us to express ourselves in some way or form. We pick up whatever material is available. It's primitive. Kids see sand on the beach, build something and show their parents: "Look what I did, Mama." It's necessary to us.

  • We're physiologically wired differently.

  • Those who say only artists and architects can create are the ones who are elitist.

  • Just because you are an architect and make decent buildings does not mean that you can suddenly become a set designer for one of the best avant-garde dancers in the world.

  • There are a great many things about architecture that are hidden from the untrained eye.

  • We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that.

  • Erich Mendelsohn's drawings are expressive and beautiful. If he'd had the computers we have now, everything I've done he would have done before me. I would have had to figure out something else.

  • There is an order to our environment, a broader order.

  • Ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

  • I'm going to design the container and interior spaces. You bring your own stuff to it and make it your own.

  • Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.

  • I like the idea of collaboration - it pushes you. It's a richer experience...

  • The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself. I tell this to my students: It's not about copying me or my logic systems. It's about allowing yourself to be yourself.

  • You've got to like the people you work with.

  • I promised a lot of people I'd slow down when I turned 80.

  • The whole can be greater than the sum of it's parts, that we all have something to put in the pie to make it better, and that the collaborative interaction works.

  • Man, there's another freedom out there, and it comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the place I'm interested in.

  • Art is about people. I think the discussion about whether architecture is art or not is lamebrain.

  • The idealism [in architecture] is in the formal arrangement, the relationship to the city, the use of materials that are available to me. That's where I say our powers are limited.

  • It's a metaphor for what we're being told: "Just stay in the box, kid, don't muddy the water." Parents say it to their kids. Teachers say it. Schools do. And so people become immune to the sameness.

  • You have to build up a credibility before the support comes to you.

  • I think my best skill as an architect is the achievement of hand-to-eye coordination. I am able to transfer a sketch into a model into the building.

  • If the room is friendly to a relationship between lecturer and audience, you feel everything - the tension, the appreciation. I think the audience feels it too.

  • The fact is I'm an opportunist. I'll take materials around me, materials on my table, and work with them as I'm searching for an idea that works.

  • For me, every day is a new thing.

  • You see a lot of so-called architecture that part of the ego trip overpowers the functionality and the budget and all that stuff.

  • I used to read more when I was a kid than I do now. It was all sort of fuel for the fire to teach you how to think and how to make things and it informed the architecture that I was doing. It's better coming in with that history and that kind of knowledge and depth of understanding of humanity that is very important for building buildings - for understanding people and how they should live and how you could make your lives better and stuff like that.

  • I'm inspired by a lot of stuff. I always was interested in sculpture and painting and music and literature and all those things. There's no one thing.

  • In Tokyo, London or Los Angeles people go into McDonald's and the restaurants are identical and people are comfortable. It's unthreatening.

  • People live and work in uninspiring environments, but look inside those rooms. Look at the painted walls and the decorations. People rebel even in the most controlled office environment in which they're not allowed to do anything. You see the little bulletin board in front of a person's desk with their photos, clippings, cartoons and whatever else.

  • I am just relating to the world we live in. I see some order in it, even though it looks like mush.

  • Computers allow architects to remain parental instead of being marginalized by the contractors and managers.

  • When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't.

  • People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary.

  • Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable.

  • The architect Borromini's Quattro Fontane, a little church in Rome, is one of the most beautiful rooms in history.

  • I'm of two minds about doing any interviews these days. It seems a lot of the world is out to play gotcha with me. I guess they always go after people these days. It's sport.

  • The thing is, I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work.

  • I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It's demeaning.

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