Frank Gehry Quotes Page 2

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 buildings are all on budget.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.”