Gehry Quotes & Sayings

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. — Frank Gehry

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. — Frank Gehry

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

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

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

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

My buildings are all on budget. — Frank Gehry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The culture of France is unique because it's a culture that has a high priority on the arts, more than any other place in the world in our time since Greece. So as a practicing artist, if you will, this is home ground. They love us, so music, literature, art continues to be the center. — Frank Gehry

You can look anywhere and find inspiration. — Frank Gehry

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

My only extravagance in life is my sailboat. I'm bonkers about that, but other than that, I don't spend money on myself. — Frank Gehry

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

I do quite like Gehry's Guggenheim. But where in Bilbao it's seen as an outgrowth of years of investment in urban design and engineering, in Britain it's seen as the catalyst for urban regeneration rather than the icing on the cake. — David Chipperfield

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

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

Where visual artists are concerned, the Baroque sculptor and architect Bernini and the painter and sculptor Picasso were clearly adept at both experiential and instrumental attending, says Tellegen, as is the modern architect Frank Gehry. Choosing a literary example, he says that F. Scott Fitzgerald once admitted to "wrapping one of his romantic flings in cellophane" for later artistic use and notes that "this kind of heartless but honest professionalism is not uncommon among creative people. — Winifred Gallagher

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. — Frank Gehry

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

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

It's going to sound strange probably. But I really like Frank Gehry's works. — William McDonough

I love everything that Frank Gehry does. I wish I could have that man build me a Wayne Manor-style mansion, like his idea of it. — Pharrell Williams

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

I live in a loft in a building I designed, but for my dream house I'd get Frank Gehry, just to see what he'd do. — Hugh Hardy

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

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

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

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

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. — Frank Gehry

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

I work from the inside out. — Frank Gehry

The Eisenhower Memorial competition and project have stirred a remarkable polemic, the center of which is not President Eisenhower or Washington, D.C. but Mr. Gehry and the values he promulgates. — Leon Krier

In an ideal world, pressure should come from below and from the top. — Frank Gehry

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

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. — Frank Gehry

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

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

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

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

Seeing results flow from my gifts is my greatest pleasure as a philanthropist - whether exonerating a jailed innocent or completing a Frank Gehry building. I want to enjoy my philanthropy. — Peter B. Lewis

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

Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass - anything and everything - the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that's how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don't understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such. — Maria Semple

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

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

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

I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John, for Britney Spears' 27th birthday and for the 'Circus' album she put out - the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry; the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings. — Ron Ben-Israel

The size thing is not some gimmick or attention-getting trick but a genuine undercurrent of the work. Frank Gehry for instance likes to imagine his buildings as sculptures. I like to imagine my sculptures as architectural. — Michael Heizer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Frank Gehry

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

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

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. — Frank Gehry

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

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

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

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. — Frank Gehry

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

Against expectations I was charmed by Gehry's Edgemar development, which housed the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and positively awed by the Bilbao Guggenheim. That Gehry is a great artist I have no doubt, but talent and determination are no warrant against confusion, nor are they a guaranty to produce great art. — Leon Krier

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

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

Let the experience begin! — Frank Gehry

Talent is liquified trouble. — Frank Gehry

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

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

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. — Frank Gehry

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. — Frank Gehry

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. — Frank Gehry

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

To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. — Maria Semple

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

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

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. — Frank Gehry

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

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

If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there's Frank Gehry. But you can't just copy somebody. If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. — Bob Dylan

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

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

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

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

You see a lot of so-called architecture that part of the ego trip overpowers the functionality and the budget and all that stuff. — Frank Gehry

Surprisingly, the Eisenhower Memorial design contains almost none of the known Gehry-box of tricks. His giant etched chain-link curtain, first applied in 1979 to hide an ungracious parking garage at Santa Monica Place, is resurrected for Eisenhower to screen the equally graceless facade of the Department of Education. — Leon Krier

Outside of advertising, the person who's influenced me most is quite possibly Frank Gehry. — Jay Chiat