Frank Gehry quotes

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

#Bad Ass #People #Ass

Not every person has the same kinds of talents, so you discover what yours are and work with them.
-- Frank Gehry

#Talent #Kind #Persons

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Being Yourself #Self Esteem #Copying

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

#Badass #Bad Ass #Talking

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Motivational #Work #Sweat

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Expression #Design #Experts

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

#Art #People #Schedules

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Eye #Thinking #Hands

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

#Being Yourself #Artist #Advice

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

#Simple #Two #People

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Beautiful #Drama #Believe

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.
-- Frank Gehry

#Life #Success #Famous Inspirational

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

#Men #Architecture

Your best work is your expression of yourself.
-- Frank Gehry

#Expression #Best Work

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

#Character #Civilization #History

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

#People #Slow Down

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

#Plans

I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.
-- Frank Gehry

#Would Be #Building #Driven

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Book #Self #Way

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

#Green #Building #Program

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Thinking #Play #Cities

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Mother #Father #Kids

Let the experience begin!
-- Frank Gehry

#Experience

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

#Issues #Marketing #Tools

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

#Want

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Father #Mean #Kitchen

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

#Cities #Downtown #Linear

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

#Perception #Overcoming

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

#Hands #Woodworking #Furniture

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

#Dry #Dull #Want

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

Take what comes your way. Do the best with it. Be responsible as you can and something good will happen...
-- Frank Gehry

#Responsibility #Way #Responsible

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Passion #Opportunity #Trying

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...
-- Frank Gehry

#Mean #Thinking #Drawing

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

#Feelings #Done #Movement

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

#Eye #Architecture #Great Men

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

#Ideas #Collaboration

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

#Father #Creativity #Stuff

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Ideas #Tables #Facts

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#People #May #Sailor

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Gone #Wells #Looking For Work

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Ties #People #Looks

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#War #Cities #Want

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Thinking #Culture #World

I work from the inside out.
-- Frank Gehry

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

#Sometimes #Refuse

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

#Starting Over #Insecurity #Healthy

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Believe #Cities #Clients

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Museums #Years #People

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

#Chicago #Architecture

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

#Artist #Italian #Influence

For me, every day is a new thing.
-- Frank Gehry

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

#Being Yourself #Example #Messages

Your work may be great and not make its way into the big picture... like Van Gogh... so who's to say what's good and bad?
-- Frank Gehry

#May #Way #Bigs

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Fun #Creativity #Grandmother

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Vacation #People #Generations

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Choices #Signatures #Looks

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Games #Play #Feelings

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

#Money #Support #Credibility

You can look anywhere and find inspiration.
-- Frank Gehry

#Inspiration #Looks

I've been told I have the biggest ego in the world and that it manifests itself when you come to me and say, 'I don't like this' or 'I want a change'... and that I relish that because my ego's so big I think I can solve whatever you throw at me and make it even better. I enjoy the interaction and the challenge.
-- Frank Gehry

#Thinking #Ego #Challenges

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#People #Projects #Bigs

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Book #Home #Lamps

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.
-- Frank Gehry

#Car #Needs #Clients

My buildings are all on budget.
-- Frank Gehry

#Building

I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.
-- Frank Gehry

#Thinking #Vacation #People

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

#Done #Stuff #Grapes