Frank Gehry Quotes

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"A lot of people don't get it, but I design from the inside out so that the finished product looks inevitable somehow. I think it's important to create spaces that people like to be in, that are humanistic."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"You've got to bumble forward into the unknown."

"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."

"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."

"I refuse to work unless I get paid, so I don't get a lot of work sometimes."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that."