Best 149 quotes of Frank Gehry on MyQuotes

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.

A new idea is obsolete in seconds, right? I just said it and now it's obsolete.

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

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

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.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Childhood play is nothing more than an expression of our individuality and preparation for human interaction. Everybody’s an artist. Unfortunately we don’t treat them as such.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Generally people are afraid. They pretend they aren’t; it’s part of the denial. We’re all part of it. As much as we pretend otherwise, we want what’s comfortable, and we’re afraid of the different. We’re afraid of change. It happened in Los Angeles, too, when the first models of Disney Hall were shown. You should have heard the outcry from the public, critics and press. It was called “broken crockery,” “outlandish” and blah blah blah. Of course now the feeling is different.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

I do my best to choose carefully. If I don’t feel that collaboration is going to happen, I say no. Think about it. These projects can involve a five-to-seven-year partnership. If you don’t feel comfortable with someone, you can’t get rid of them. I just walked away from a job for that reason. Every one of these projects is an emotional investment, like falling in love. You’ve got to believe in it and you’ve got to like the people you work with.

I don't know how to overcome this perception that I'm extravagant.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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