Frank Gehry Quotes

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

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.

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

Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.

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 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 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.

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

I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.

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.

For me, every day is a new thing.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Green issues have been used as a marketing tool. Sometimes these green claims are completely meaningless.

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.

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

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 promised a lot of people I'd slow down when I turned 80.

Let the experience begin!

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 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.

I don't want to do architecture that's dry and dull.

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

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

I don't make things with my hands, although I studied woodworking and made furniture.

In the end, the character of a civilization is encased in its structures.

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.

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

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.

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

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

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

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

Talent is liquified trouble.

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

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.

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

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.

I work from the inside out.

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.

I like the idea of collaboration - it pushes you. It's a richer experience ...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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