Frank Gehry Architecture Quotations

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.

I attended a lecture by a gray-haired old man from Finland, who later I discovered was the architect Alvar Aalto. I was very moved. I wasn't interested in architecture, but it was a moving thing I've never forgotten.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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