Frank gehry quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I think the biggest problem with 'industrial' architecture is that it's lost its sense of humanity. Minimalist stuff drains all the humanity out of it. That idea works great for the money thing, but it doesn't work great for the feeling thing.

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.

If you're serious about being an architect, you've got to learn how to take responsibility. It's not fluff. You have to do every detail on every bloody piece of the building. You have to know how the engineering works. You have to know how the fittings go together. You have to master the mechanical, electrical, acoustical - everything.

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. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

For me, every day is a new thing.

A new idea is obsolete in seconds, right?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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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."

I do my best to choose carefully. If I don’t feel that collaboration is going to happen, I say no. Think about it. These projects can involve a five-to-seven-year partnership. If you don’t feel comfortable with someone, you can’t get rid of them. I just walked away from a job for that reason. Every one of these projects is an emotional investment, like falling in love. You’ve got to believe in it and you’ve got to like the people you work with.

Your best work is your expression of yourself.

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

You can look anywhere and find inspiration.

I'm a do-gooder liberal.

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.

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

Ultimately you can't repress individuality, even though you can try.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it.

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.

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.

Artists dismiss me as an architect, so I'm not in their box, and architects dismiss me as an artist, so I'm not in their box.

You have to do every detail on every bloody piece of the building. You have to know how the engineering works. You have to know how the fittings go together. You have to master the mechanical, electrical, acoustical - everything.

Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. "The client made me do this." "The city made me do this." "Oh, the budget." I don't believe that anymore.

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

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.

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.

As much as we pretend otherwise, we want what's comfortable, and we're afraid of the different. We're afraid of change.

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.

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

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

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

When you agree to collaborate, you agree to jump off a cliff holding hands with everyone, hoping the resourcefulness of each will insure that you all land on your feet.

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.

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

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

I am obsessed with architecture. It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself as an architect, and how best to contribute in this world filled with contradiction, disparity, and inequality, even passion and opportunity.

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.

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

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

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

That's why you go into architecture - at least I did - to do things for people. I think most of us are idealists. You start out that way, anyway.

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.

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.

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.

Generally people are more impressed with the services and the comfort issues than the design.

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

Everybody's an artist. Unfortunately we don't treat them as such.

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.

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.

Ideas exist in the marketplace; they are thrown out for everyone to use.

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

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

The rap on me on the street is the opposite - I'm impractical, I'm more expensive, it's too complicated and I run over budgets, which isn't true. None of that's true and there's plenty of documentation if anybody needs it.

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.

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.

There are places that are so designed they're unlivable.

I'm preprogrammed emotionally and intellectually not to go down blind alleys. I don't waste the time. I automatically edit out whatever's impractical.

In the art world Robert Rauschenberg had been combining common materials that people thought was art and beautiful, and it was. If he could do that, I could emulate him.

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

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

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.

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.

We're physiologically wired differently.

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 don't know whose box I'm in, and I don't really care.

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

I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.

We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me."

It's not elitist to acknowledge that everyone has a unique signature and everyone is different.

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

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.

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

The back of Saint Peter's is one of the finest pieces of architecture I've ever seen.

Childhood play is nothing more than an expression of our individuality and preparation for human interaction. Everybody’s an artist. Unfortunately we don’t treat them as such.

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

I don't know how to overcome this perception that I'm extravagant.

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.

Generally people are afraid. They pretend they aren’t; it’s part of the denial. We’re all part of it. As much as we pretend otherwise, we want what’s comfortable, and we’re afraid of the different. We’re afraid of change. It happened in Los Angeles, too, when the first models of Disney Hall were shown. You should have heard the outcry from the public, critics and press. It was called “broken crockery,” “outlandish” and blah blah blah. Of course now the feeling is different.

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

The culture of France is unique because it's a culture that has a high priority on the arts, more than any other place in the world in our time since Greece. So as a practicing artist, if you will, this is home ground. They love us, so music, literature, art continues to be the center.

I work from the inside out.

What I have learned about museum buildings is that buildings have to have iconic presentations. The position of the art museum vis-a-vis other civic buildings needs to be hierarchal in the community. It has to be equal to the library and the courthouse.

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

Everyone has a desire, if not a need, to use their individual signatures. Whenever people meet to talk about a project, even stuffy old businessmen, they say they want to create something new.

Let the experience begin!

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

One of my unsung heroes is Erich Mendelsohn. I met him when I was a student and he was a cranky old man and very unpleasant. But if you go to his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany you see an enormous intellect at work with a language that was personal and new. It has a sense of urban design and of theater and procession I hadn't seen before.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Democracy is a problem and we don't want to get rid of it.