Frank Gehry Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I don't want to do architecture that's dry and dull.

This neo-minimalism super cold stuff is weird to me. I need a place where I can come home and take my shoes off.

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

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

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'm a leftie, and I've always believed in doing things on a modest scale.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We want that center, we yearn for it, we need it. It shouldn't look like New York or Paris, it should look like us.

One particular image of an Edwardian woman captured my imagination, ... The movement of the dress as she promenaded along the seafront provided the inspiration for the historical references and sculptured forms in the design.

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

I think that there is a desire on the part of the city and county to do something special there.

Jewelry is an art form, ... In conceptualizing designs for Tiffany, I worked as I always do, sketching and creating models. Sculptors and painters have inspired me with their ability to make things with their own hands. This process led to the discovery of new ways to give feeling and spirit to form, and realize our shared vision of jewelry that provides a beautiful context for living now.

It needs a mix of populations. It's got to be a mix of different age groups, economic groups and ethnic groups to really function.

I hope that people will wander through it. It's a spread-out downtown. It's an L.A. downtown, it's not a New York downtown.

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

When you were a kid, if you went to the Montreal Forum or a hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens, which I did, there was a great feeling. The new stadiums don't have it. Why don't they have it? Building codes.

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

We're physiologically wired differently.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

Generally in our world, whether in architecture or almost anywhere else, we devalue the artist, and schools at whatever level shut people down.

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.

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.

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

We deny our nature to build and create and then wonder why there is so much alienation and dissatisfaction.

Many people put a green button on their collar and feel good, just like a lot of people put an American flag on their lapels and feel patriotic. It's not enough.

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

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.

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.

With computers we can work everything out from the beginning.

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.

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.

If the general public demanded better, they'd get better, because the market­place responds to the public's needs and desires.

Picasso could use everyone's paintings and transform them into his own. He was using ideas from all of his contemporaries.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Some cultures tried to stop people from expressing themselves. In Mao's China, for example, the Communists tried to stop individual expression. For them the payoff was a society of equality. The problem of course is that it didn't work.

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 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.