Frank Gehry Quotes

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

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

My father always told me that I was going to be a failure - I think he was more talking about himself, but I didn't know it at the time.

We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me."

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

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

Your best work is your expression of yourself.

If you're serious about being an architect, you've got to learn how to take responsibility. It's not fluff. 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're physiologically wired differently.

An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it 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 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 think the biggest problem with 'industrial' architecture is that it's lost its sense of humanity. Minimalist stuff drains all the humanity out of it. That idea works great for the money thing, but it doesn't work great for the feeling thing.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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. It can for children - for anyone. It still does for me.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.