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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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

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

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.

You can look anywhere and find inspiration.

The safety requirements, which are necessary, spread everything out and push people farther and farther away from the stage and from each other.

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

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

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...

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

Your best work is your expression of yourself.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.