Frank Gehry Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Your best work is your expression of yourself.

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

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

You can look anywhere and find inspiration.

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

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

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.

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.

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

That's what you have to find in architecture. You have to find your signature. When you find it, you're the only expert on it. People can say they like it or don't like it. They can argue about it, but it's yours.

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.

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

We don't see the banality, but we accept banality. We accept it as inevitable, and it's not.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We should celebrate variety rather than conformity and allow people to express themselves. That we don't is more of our denial.

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 love working. I don't know what the word vacation means.

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.

You've got to bumble forward into the unknown.

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

We have always created - music, literature, art, dance. The art around us - or lack of it - may be a measure of how we're doing as individuals and as a civilization, so maybe we should be worried.

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

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.

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.

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."

The whole can be greater than the sum of it's parts, that we all have something to put in the pie to make it better, and that the collaborative interaction works.

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

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

There's a drive in us to express ourselves in some way or form. We pick up whatever material is available. It's primitive. Kids see sand on the beach, build something and show their parents: "Look what I did, Mama." It's necessary to us.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Let the experience begin!

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.

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.