Frank Gehry Quotations | Page 2

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 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.

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

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

Let the experience begin!

I work from the inside out.

Here we are surrounded by material that's being manufactured in unimaginable quantities worldwide and is used everywhere. I don't like it, no one likes it, and yet it's pervasive. We don't even see it.

I don't micromanage the interiors. People ask me to and I say no. I don't want to control everything.

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.

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'm a do-gooder liberal.

I've been told I have the biggest ego in the world and that it manifests itself when you come to me and say, 'I don't like this' or 'I want a change'... and that I relish that because my ego's so big I think I can solve whatever you throw at me and make it even better. I enjoy the interaction and the challenge.

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

In an ideal world, pressure should come from below and from the top.

My buildings are all on budget.

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.

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.

When I was a child I could do math and art, so I had left- and right-brain capabilities. But I've seen my children, who are more right-brained, struggling. My son was told he wouldn't make it to college, but he dogged it through and ended up being accepted by 10 major art schools after the high school advisor said, "Please don't apply. You're going to be disappointed." That kid's an artist now.

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.

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?

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

It should begin much earlier with arts education in the American school system, which is sadly deficient.

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

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

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.

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.

If you're serious about being an architect, you've got to learn how to take responsibility.

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

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

China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.

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

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.

People are searching for something they don't have in their lives. There's an unfulfilled need.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

With computers we can work everything out from the beginning.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

We're physiologically wired differently.

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

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.

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